Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisAn engaging study of Black Feminism as expressed through literature written by and about Black girlsIn Light and Legacies: Stories of Black Girlhood and Liberation, author Janaka Lewis examines Black girlhood in American literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The representation of Black girlhood in contemporary literature has long remained underexplored. Through this literary history of "Black Girl Magic," Lewis offers one of the first studies in this rapidly growing field of study. Light and Legacies poignantly showcases the activist dimensions of creative literature through work by women writers such as Toni Morrison and Toni Cade. As vectors of protest, these stories reflect historical events while also creating an enduring space of liberation and expression. The book provides didactic and reflective portrayals of the Black experience—an experience which has long been misunderstood. In a work both enlightening and personal, Lewis brilliantly weaves accounts of her own journey in conjunction with the liberating stories that shaped her and so many others.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA fresh examination of Harper's body of work as an archive of Black life, thought, and culture.The first book devoted to the groundbreaking poet's work, Understanding Michael S. Harper locates his poetic project within Black expressive tradition. The study examines poems drawn from the eleven volumes of verse that Harper (1938-2016) produced between 1970 and 2010, bringing attention to his poetry's sustained engagement with music, literature, and the visual arts. Author Michael A. Antonucci offers readers an account of the poet's career while assessing his verse and providing a sense of its perspective on Black America and American experience.Throughout his examination of Harper's verse, Antonucci builds upon the critical attention the poet received at the outset of his career—he was twice nominated for the National Book Award. Exploring the poet's celebrated examinations of history, kinship, and Black music, Understanding Michael S. Harper develops and expands critical dialogues about the poet and his body of work, which, Antonucci argues, presents a counter narrative about the composition and origins of the United States, reshaping prevailing discourse about race, nation, and identity.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA fresh examination of Harper's body of work as an archive of Black life, thought, and culture.The first book devoted to the groundbreaking poet's work, Understanding Michael S. Harper locates his poetic project within Black expressive tradition. The study examines poems drawn from the eleven volumes of verse that Harper (1938-2016) produced between 1970 and 2010, bringing attention to his poetry's sustained engagement with music, literature, and the visual arts. Author Michael A. Antonucci offers readers an account of the poet's career while assessing his verse and providing a sense of its perspective on Black America and American experience.Throughout his examination of Harper's verse, Antonucci builds upon the critical attention the poet received at the outset of his career—he was twice nominated for the National Book Award. Exploring the poet's celebrated examinations of history, kinship, and Black music, Understanding Michael S. Harper develops and expands critical dialogues about the poet and his body of work, which, Antonucci argues, presents a counter narrative about the composition and origins of the United States, reshaping prevailing discourse about race, nation, and identity.

Read more less

Book SynopsisUnderstanding Etheridge Knight introduces readers to a major—but understudied—American poet. Etheridge Knight (1931-1991) survived a shrapnel wound suffered during military service in Korea, as well as a drug addiction that led to an eight-year prison sentence, to publish five volumes of poetry and a small cache of powerful prose. His status in the front ranks of American poets and thinkers on poetry was acknowledged in 1984, when he won the Shelley Memorial Award, which had previously gone, as an acknowledgement of "genius and need," to E.E. Cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W. S. Merwin. In this first book-length study of Knight and his complete body of work, Michael Collins examines the poetry of a complex literary figure who, following imprisonment, transformed his life to establish himself as a charismatic voice in American poetry and an accomplished teacher at institutions such as the University of Hartford, Lincoln University, and his own Free Peoples Poetry Workshops. Beginning with a concise biography of Knight, Collins explores Knight's volumes of poetry including Poems from Prison, Black Voices from Prison, Born of a Woman, and The Essential Etheridge Knight. Unpdated to include a new preface, Understanding Etheridge Knight brings attention to a crucial era in African American and American poetry, and to the literature of the incarcerated, while reflecting on the life and work of an original voice in American poetry.Trade ReviewA superb venture in literary criticism and intellectual biography. Michael Collins brings erudition, intelligence, shrewdness, and deftness of expression to this study of a significant if little-known American poet." - Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University"Collins has written the book that Knight has long deserved." - American Literary Scholarship"An illuminating excavation of Knight's poetry and legacy." - The Journal of African American History

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores seven startling paradoxes behind the bestselling novelist's lasting popularity Agatha Christie stands as the bestselling novelist of all time and, in terms of total sales in all genres, places only behind the Christian Bible and Shakespeare. Since the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Christie's fiction has withstood the envy of her peers and the snipes of critics, while garnering the admiration of countless readers. From her puzzling persona (notably in her eleven-day disappearance in 1926) and status as "Queen of the Cozies" to her tragicomic themes and critiques of Englishness, Christie built a lasting literary legacy that perplexes and pleases her hordes of readers. In Understanding Agatha Christie, Tison Pugh takes a fresh look at the contemporary world's most popular author, investigating seven notable paradoxes behind her lasting success, thereby illuminating the literary innovations that have contributed to her uncannily timeless appeal.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores seven startling paradoxes behind the bestselling novelist's lasting popularity Agatha Christie stands as the bestselling novelist of all time and, in terms of total sales in all genres, places only behind the Christian Bible and Shakespeare. Since the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Christie's fiction has withstood the envy of her peers and the snipes of critics, while garnering the admiration of countless readers. From her puzzling persona (notably in her eleven-day disappearance in 1926) and status as "Queen of the Cozies" to her tragicomic themes and critiques of Englishness, Christie built a lasting literary legacy that perplexes and pleases her hordes of readers. In Understanding Agatha Christie, Tison Pugh takes a fresh look at the contemporary world's most popular author, investigating seven notable paradoxes behind her lasting success, thereby illuminating the literary innovations that have contributed to her uncannily timeless appeal.

Read more less

Book SynopsisJada Ach's scholarship in Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 seeks to reevaluate the Progressive Era's environmental legacy. Taking an ecocritical approach to turn-of-the-century literature set in the American West, Ach interrogates texts by asking what kinds of environmental, national, and cultural stories the elements have to tell about land and oceanic management. Sand, Water, Salt investigates managerial engagements with dynamic ecologies in three particular Western environments: the arid deserts, the semiarid high plains, and the Pacific Ocean.At different times, and to varying degrees, Americans have deemed these environments economically unproductive, incompatible with Anglo-American settlement, and/or highly unmanageable. Despite these varied complaints, the United States has also intensely desired these "wasteland" spaces, perceiving them as sources of both national wealth and elite pleasure. Sand, Water, Salt moves through a variety of novels, memoirs, and cultural artifacts from the 1880s to the 1920s, including L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank Norris's McTeague, Mary Hunter Austin's The Land of Little Rain, The Virginian by Owen Wister, Life among the Piutes by Sarah Winnemucca, as well as Jack London's The Sea-Wolf and Yone Noguchi's The American Diary of a Japanese Girl. Ach ultimately asks what we gain by looking back at fin-de-siècle American literature with a queer, ecological justice-oriented eye, a particularly invigorating conversation that uniquely uses the elements as foci.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFocusing on the didactic nature of the work of Reinaldo Arenas, this book demonstrates the Cuban writer’s influence as public pedagogue, mentor, and social activist whose teaching on resistance to normative ideologies resonates in societies past, present, and future.Through a multidisciplinary approach bridging educational, historiographic, and literary perspectives, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas illuminates how Arenas’s work remains a cutting-edge source of inspiration for today’s audiences, particularly LGBTQI readers. It shows how Arenas’s aesthetics contain powerful insights for exploring dissensus whether in the context of Cuba, broader Pan-American and Latinx-U.S. queer movements of social justice, or transnational citizenship politics. Carefully dissecting Arenas’s themes against the backdrop of his political activity, this book presents the writer’s poetry, novels, and plays as a curriculum of dissidence that provides models for socially engaged intellectual activism.Trade Review“A welcome and needed work at a time when academia is reenvisioning its discursive fields. It breathes new life into Reinaldo Arenas’s literary corpus by treating it as a cultural object that may be appreciated by different academic disciplines.”—Carlos Riobó, author of Caught between the Lines: Captives, Frontiers, and National Identity in Argentine Literature and Art“Imagines a thoroughly unique, productively innovative critical and scholarly approach to understanding one of twentieth-century literature’s most misunderstood and misread giants. This book models powerfully alternative ways to think not only about Arenas but also about ourselves, as writers, as teachers, and as activists.”—Ricardo L. Ortiz, author of Latinx Literature Now: Between Evanescence and Event

Read more less

Book SynopsisHow contemporary Cuban writers build transnational communities In Writing Islands, Elena Lahr-Vivaz employs methods from archipelagic studies to analyze works of contemporary Cuban writers on the island alongside those in exile. Offering a new lens to explore the multiplicity of Cuban space and identity, she argues that these writers approach their nation as part of a larger, transnational network of islands. Introducing the term “arcubiélago” to describe the spaces created by Cuban writers, both on the ground and in print, Lahr-Vivaz illuminates how transnational communities are forged and how they function across space and time. Lahr-Vivaz considers how poets, novelists, and essayists of the 1990s and 2000s built interconnected communities of readers through blogs, state-sponsored book fairs, informal methods of book circulation, and intertextual dialogues. Book chapters offer in-depth analyses of the works of writers as different as Reina María Rodríguez, known for lyrical poetry, and Zoé Valdés, known for strident critiques of Fidel Castro. Incorporating insights from on-site interviews in Cuba, Spain, and the United States, Lahr-Vivaz analyzes how writers maintained connections materially, through the distribution of works, and metaphorically, as their texts bridge spaces separated by geopolitics. Through a decolonizing methodology that resists limiting Cuba to a distinct geographic space, Writing Islands investigates the nuances of Cuban identity, the creation of alternate spaces of identity, the potential of the Internet for artistic expression, and the transnational bonds that join far-flung communities. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. Unlike many of his Symbolist generation, Bakhtin was not fascinated by his own self-image. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin’s personal views: on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Bakhtin's passion for poetic language and his insights into music also come as a surprise to readers of his essays on the novel. One remarkable thread running through the conversations is Bakhtin's love of poetry, masses of which he knew by heart in several languages. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, translated and annotated here from the complete transcript of the tapes, offers a fuller, more flexible image of Bakhtin than we could have imagined beneath his now famous texts. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"Bahktin is one of the giants of 20th Century social and cultural theory." * Voice Literary Supplement *“Bakhtin was never interested in writing his memoirs, nor in making out of himself a work of art. Or even a good story. In his view, we have great novels for that. But Viktor Duvakin, who shared Bakhtin’s deep love of poetry, found just the right tone and timing to put his subject at ease. The result, in this full and fluent rendering of the taped sessions, is as close as we can come to the master’s nimble, irreverent, freely-roaming voice.” -- Caryl Emerson * Princeton University *“The Duvakin recordings were a surprise gift to Bakhtin scholars: a series of intimate but vigorous conversations, led by an expert interviewer, in which Bakhtin described his life and times in striking detail. Now available in a marvelously readable English translation, they are an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Bakhtin and his historical-cultural context, as well as anyone with an interest in the culture and cultural politics of the Soviet Union.” -- Ken Hirschkop * University of Waterloo *“This book is an extraordinary contribution to cultural and intellectual history. Bakhtin’s conversations with Duvakin capture a succession of epochs and dramatic events; they reveal a Bakhtin who is both vulnerable and sovereign, anchored in his time and breaking free of its constraints.” -- Galin Tihanov * Queen Mary University of London *While some readers may not relish working through the thicket of allusions and references that occasion these interviews, there are many rewards to be had for doing so, especially for intellectual historians of twentieth-century Russia, and for Bakhtin scholars everywhere. I recommend it highly. * The Russian Review *Table of ContentsIllustrations IntroductionSlav N. Gratchev Translator’s IntroductionMargarita Marinova Interview One, February 22, 1973 Interview Two, March 1, 1973 Interview Three, March 8, 1973 Interview Four, March 15, 1973 Interview Five, March 22, 1973 Interview Six, March 23, 1973 Afterword: Six Interviews about the Death and Resurrection of the WordDmitriy Sporov Acknowledgments Bibliography, of the Introductions and Afterword ...IndexAbout the Editors and Translator

Read more less

Book SynopsisDrawing on the poetry of four major voices in the Spanish lyric of today, Judith Nantell explores the epistemic works of Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas, arguing that, for them, the poem is the fundamental means of exploring the nature of both knowledge and poetry. In this first interpretive analysis of the epistemic nature of their poetry, Nantell innovatively engages these poets, each of whom has contributed one of their own poems along with a previously unpublished explication of their chosen poem. Each also provides an original biographical sketch to support Nantell’s development of a poetics of epiphany. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. Trade Review"Judith Nantell's The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a fantastic addition to scholarship on Spanish contemporary poetry. This is an incredibly original and multifaceted work, and the combination of scholarly analyses with contributions from the authors themselves and their poetry makes this a highly original and perceptive piece of work." -- Diana Cullell * editor, Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology *“Judith Nantell’s The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a significant work of criticism that brings to light current lyric innovations in Spain, with particular attention to the epistemic strain in the work of four very recent poets: Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas. Nantell’s primary argument is that these four share a vision of their art as a process and a movement towards a state of acute realization and insight into their chosen art and, indeed, into the nature of reality. Nantell shows the four to be authors of a “universalist” lyric poetry, written in Spanish across and beyond borders, and fueled – but not limited by -- literary canon, tradition, and artistic influence. This study exhibits a wealth of insights and original observations, bolstered and fortified by the critical armature reflective of the depth and extension of Judith Nantell’s research.” -- Sylvia Sherno * co-editor, Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World *"The book is a major contribution to an understanding of the contemporary Spanish lyric, apt for a general audience, specialists in contemporary Spanish literature, and as a model for introducing new poets in graduate classes. In a sense, the study is itself epiphanic. One reads the delimited analyses of just four poets and then somewhat surprisingly realizes that the study offers a clearly defined road map leading into the core of the contemporary Spanish lyric." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today offers an enthusiastic celebration of the work of four contemporary Spanish poets....Those in search of an introduction to the work of four poets that highlights each poet’s voice through the inclusion and discussion of biographical statements, poetics, poems, and auto-analyses, though, will undoubtedly find this book to be a valuable resource and point of entry into the work of these four poets." * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *"Judith Nantell's The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a fantastic addition to scholarship on Spanish contemporary poetry. This is an incredibly original and multifaceted work, and the combination of scholarly analyses with contributions from the authors themselves and their poetry makes this a highly original and perceptive piece of work." -- Diana Cullell * editor, Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology *“Judith Nantell’s The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a significant work of criticism that brings to light current lyric innovations in Spain, with particular attention to the epistemic strain in the work of four very recent poets: Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas. Nantell’s primary argument is that these four share a vision of their art as a process and a movement towards a state of acute realization and insight into their chosen art and, indeed, into the nature of reality. Nantell shows the four to be authors of a “universalist” lyric poetry, written in Spanish across and beyond borders, and fueled – but not limited by -- literary canon, tradition, and artistic influence. This study exhibits a wealth of insights and original observations, bolstered and fortified by the critical armature reflective of the depth and extension of Judith Nantell’s research.” -- Sylvia Sherno * co-editor, Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World *"The book is a major contribution to an understanding of the contemporary Spanish lyric, apt for a general audience, specialists in contemporary Spanish literature, and as a model for introducing new poets in graduate classes. In a sense, the study is itself epiphanic. One reads the delimited analyses of just four poets and then somewhat surprisingly realizes that the study offers a clearly defined road map leading into the core of the contemporary Spanish lyric." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today offers an enthusiastic celebration of the work of four contemporary Spanish poets....Those in search of an introduction to the work of four poets that highlights each poet’s voice through the inclusion and discussion of biographical statements, poetics, poems, and auto-analyses, though, will undoubtedly find this book to be a valuable resource and point of entry into the work of these four poets." * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ... vi Note on Translations ... vii Introduction ... 1 1 Luis Muñoz: The Instant ... 26 Complete Poems by Muñoz ... 75 2 Abraham Gragera: The Word ... 93 Complete Poems by Gragera ... 148 3 Josep M. Rodríguez: The Images ... 184 Complete Poems by Rodríguez ... 262 4 Ada Salas: Poetry and Poetics ... 302 Complete Poems by Salas ... 368 Afterword ... 389 Acknowledgments ... 395 Notes ... 398 Works Cited ... 399 Index ... 415

Read more less

Book SynopsisDrawing on the poetry of four major voices in the Spanish lyric of today, Judith Nantell explores the epistemic works of Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas, arguing that, for them, the poem is the fundamental means of exploring the nature of both knowledge and poetry. In this first interpretive analysis of the epistemic nature of their poetry, Nantell innovatively engages these poets, each of whom has contributed one of their own poems along with a previously unpublished explication of their chosen poem. Each also provides an original biographical sketch to support Nantell’s development of a poetics of epiphany. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. Trade Review"Judith Nantell's The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a fantastic addition to scholarship on Spanish contemporary poetry. This is an incredibly original and multifaceted work, and the combination of scholarly analyses with contributions from the authors themselves and their poetry makes this a highly original and perceptive piece of work." -- Diana Cullell * editor, Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology *“Judith Nantell’s The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a significant work of criticism that brings to light current lyric innovations in Spain, with particular attention to the epistemic strain in the work of four very recent poets: Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas. Nantell’s primary argument is that these four share a vision of their art as a process and a movement towards a state of acute realization and insight into their chosen art and, indeed, into the nature of reality. Nantell shows the four to be authors of a “universalist” lyric poetry, written in Spanish across and beyond borders, and fueled – but not limited by -- literary canon, tradition, and artistic influence. This study exhibits a wealth of insights and original observations, bolstered and fortified by the critical armature reflective of the depth and extension of Judith Nantell’s research.” -- Sylvia Sherno * co-editor, Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World *"The book is a major contribution to an understanding of the contemporary Spanish lyric, apt for a general audience, specialists in contemporary Spanish literature, and as a model for introducing new poets in graduate classes. In a sense, the study is itself epiphanic. One reads the delimited analyses of just four poets and then somewhat surprisingly realizes that the study offers a clearly defined road map leading into the core of the contemporary Spanish lyric." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today offers an enthusiastic celebration of the work of four contemporary Spanish poets....Those in search of an introduction to the work of four poets that highlights each poet’s voice through the inclusion and discussion of biographical statements, poetics, poems, and auto-analyses, though, will undoubtedly find this book to be a valuable resource and point of entry into the work of these four poets." * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *"Judith Nantell's The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a fantastic addition to scholarship on Spanish contemporary poetry. This is an incredibly original and multifaceted work, and the combination of scholarly analyses with contributions from the authors themselves and their poetry makes this a highly original and perceptive piece of work." -- Diana Cullell * editor, Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology *“Judith Nantell’s The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a significant work of criticism that brings to light current lyric innovations in Spain, with particular attention to the epistemic strain in the work of four very recent poets: Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas. Nantell’s primary argument is that these four share a vision of their art as a process and a movement towards a state of acute realization and insight into their chosen art and, indeed, into the nature of reality. Nantell shows the four to be authors of a “universalist” lyric poetry, written in Spanish across and beyond borders, and fueled – but not limited by -- literary canon, tradition, and artistic influence. This study exhibits a wealth of insights and original observations, bolstered and fortified by the critical armature reflective of the depth and extension of Judith Nantell’s research.” -- Sylvia Sherno * co-editor, Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World *"The book is a major contribution to an understanding of the contemporary Spanish lyric, apt for a general audience, specialists in contemporary Spanish literature, and as a model for introducing new poets in graduate classes. In a sense, the study is itself epiphanic. One reads the delimited analyses of just four poets and then somewhat surprisingly realizes that the study offers a clearly defined road map leading into the core of the contemporary Spanish lyric." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today offers an enthusiastic celebration of the work of four contemporary Spanish poets....Those in search of an introduction to the work of four poets that highlights each poet’s voice through the inclusion and discussion of biographical statements, poetics, poems, and auto-analyses, though, will undoubtedly find this book to be a valuable resource and point of entry into the work of these four poets." * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ... vi Note on Translations ... vii Introduction ... 1 1 Luis Muñoz: The Instant ... 26 Complete Poems by Muñoz ... 75 2 Abraham Gragera: The Word ... 93 Complete Poems by Gragera ... 148 3 Josep M. Rodríguez: The Images ... 184 Complete Poems by Rodríguez ... 262 4 Ada Salas: Poetry and Poetics ... 302 Complete Poems by Salas ... 368 Afterword ... 389 Acknowledgments ... 395 Notes ... 398 Works Cited ... 399 Index ... 415

Read more less

Book SynopsisPublished in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. German author Johann Gottfried Schnabel—who in 1731 penned his own island narrative—coined the term “Robinsonade” to characterize the genre bred by this classic, and today hundreds of examples can be identified worldwide. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the Robinsonade’s endurance, analyzing its various literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context. Contributors trace the Robinsonade’s roots from the eighteenth century to generic affinities in later traditions, including juvenile fiction, science fiction, and apocalyptic fiction, and finally to contemporary adaptations in film, television, theater, and popular culture. Taken together, these essays convince us that the genre’s adapt- ability to changing social and cultural circumstances explains its relevance to this day. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. Trade Review"An impressively ambitious and comprehensive collection of essays on Robinsonades." -- John Richetti * editor of the Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe *“Rewriting Crusoe collects a wide range of international scholars to look at the Robinsonade tradition in various media across three centuries. The collection exhibits the range of responses to Robinson Crusoe and considers how they reflect various cultural and literary concerns.” -- Leah Orr * author of Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730 *"Rewriting Crusoe offers invigorating re-examinations of a timeless and timely genre. The broad scope of texts examined and the international profile of its authors makes this book an important contribution to studies of the Robinsonade and testament that this genre still holds power." -- Rebecca Weaver-Hightower * author of Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest in Post/Colonial Island N *"Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media assembles an international group of scholars who present exciting new approaches to the cultural afterlives of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel. Robinson Crusoe is one of the most successful books of all time, ubiquitous first in Europe and then around the world. Novel historians credit it with transforming prose fiction with psychological realism. It has been translated into dozens of languages and it has directly and indirectly inspired a plenitude of adaptations and appropriations in that time. The essays in Rewriting Crusoe follow the Robinsonades themselves across genres and media—fiction, film, plays, and TV—and they respond to a range of works, from immediate, direct responses in Britain to more distant and looser echoes across the globe. What is original and distinctive about the volume is its demonstration of how Robinsonades not only challenge key aspects of the archetypal castaway narrative—masculine individualism, literary realism, and ecological and colonial domination—but that these ideologies have always been in a process of contestation. Together the essays illuminate what editor Jakub Lipski calls 'the potential of the Robinsonade to adapt to changing circumstances, in terms of content and genre, and … its continuous relevance in new contexts.' The book provides a model for the potential of collaborative approaches to diffuse literary afterlives, and it is essential reading for those interested in the impact of eighteenth-century ideas through the ages." -- Nicholas Seager * Co-editor of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"An impressively ambitious and comprehensive collection of essays on Robinsonades." -- John Richetti * editor of the Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe *“Rewriting Crusoe collects a wide range of international scholars to look at the Robinsonade tradition in various media across three centuries. The collection exhibits the range of responses to Robinson Crusoe and considers how they reflect various cultural and literary concerns.” -- Leah Orr * author of Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730 *"Rewriting Crusoe offers invigorating re-examinations of a timeless and timely genre. The broad scope of texts examined and the international profile of its authors makes this book an important contribution to studies of the Robinsonade and testament that this genre still holds power." -- Rebecca Weaver-Hightower * author of Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest in Post/Colonial Island N *"Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media assembles an international group of scholars who present exciting new approaches to the cultural afterlives of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel. Robinson Crusoe is one of the most successful books of all time, ubiquitous first in Europe and then around the world. Novel historians credit it with transforming prose fiction with psychological realism. It has been translated into dozens of languages and it has directly and indirectly inspired a plenitude of adaptations and appropriations in that time. The essays in Rewriting Crusoe follow the Robinsonades themselves across genres and media—fiction, film, plays, and TV—and they respond to a range of works, from immediate, direct responses in Britain to more distant and looser echoes across the globe. What is original and distinctive about the volume is its demonstration of how Robinsonades not only challenge key aspects of the archetypal castaway narrative—masculine individualism, literary realism, and ecological and colonial domination—but that these ideologies have always been in a process of contestation. Together the essays illuminate what editor Jakub Lipski calls 'the potential of the Robinsonade to adapt to changing circumstances, in terms of content and genre, and … its continuous relevance in new contexts.' The book provides a model for the potential of collaborative approaches to diffuse literary afterlives, and it is essential reading for those interested in the impact of eighteenth-century ideas through the ages." -- Nicholas Seager * Co-editor of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction *Table of ContentsNote on the Edition Used Foreword by Robert Mayer IntroductionJakub Lipski Part I: Exploring and Transcending the Genre Mushrooms, Capers, and other sorts of Pickles”: Remaking Genre in Peter Longueville’s The Hermit (1727)Rivka Swenson“If I had …”: Counterfactuals, Imaginary Realities and the Poetics of the Postmodern RobinsonadePatrick Gill Part II: National Contexts Castaways and Colonialism: Dislocating Cultural Encounter in The Female American (1767)Przemysław UścińskiSetting the Scene for the Polish Robinsonade: The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom (1776) by Ignacy Krasicki and the Early Reception of Robinson Crusoe in Poland, 1769-1775Jakub LipskiThe Rise and Fall of Robinson Crusoe on the London StageFrederick BurwickIslands in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886): A Counter-RobinsonadeMárta Pellérdi Part III: Ecocritical Readings Stormy Weather and the Gentle Isle: Apprehending the Environment of Three RobinsonadesLora E. GeriguisRobinson’s Becoming-Earth in Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967)Krzysztof Skonieczny Part IV: The Robinsonade and the Present Condition “The True State of Our Condition”: The Twenty-First-Century Worker as CastawayJennifer Preston Wilson Gilligan’s Wake, Gilligan’s Island, and Historiographizing American Popular CultureIan Kinane Coda: Rewriting the RobinsonadeDaniel Cook Acknowledgements Bibliography About the Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisCalila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite explores the last six novels by Spain´s most honored contemporary woman writer. Its scholarship is enriched by the voice of Calila herself—as Brown called Martín Gaite, who was a dear friend—as they conversed and exchanged letters during the composition of the novels. The book opens with an introduction to Martín Gaite´s life and literature and ends with a consideration of her legacy. Each central chapter analyzes a later novel in its historical, biographical, and critical contexts. From the young adult fantasy Caperucita en Manhattan (Red Riding Hood in Manhattan) to the post-Transition epistolary masterpiece Nubosidad variable (Variable Cloud), the Transition-era saga La Reina de las Nieves (The Farewell Angel), the Proustian reminiscence Lo raro es vivir (Living’s the Strange Thing), the narrative tapestry Irse de casa (Leaving Home), and the memoir of family secrets Los parentescos (Family Relations), these fascinating novels evoke themes that resonate today. Trade Review"Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martin Gaite is a fascinating window into the life and later works of one of the most eminent Spanish novelists of all times. Joan L. Brown combines relevant history, original analysis and personal anecdotes from 'Calila’s' personal letters into a compelling and delightful rendition." -- María-Luisa Guardiola * editor of the Royal Spanish Academy's critical edition of Antonio García Gutiérrez's El trovador *"Martín Gaite’s works are now studied all around the world, especially in further education establishments. More and more students are researching her latest novels and Calila will be an indispensable read as Brown combines the critical study of the author’s texts, with their socio-historical background, and a personal view of the process of writing." -- Maria-José Blanco * author of Life-writing in Carmen Martín Gaite’s Cuadernos de todo and her Novels of the 1990s *"As I read Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite, I had to battle the temptation to put the volume aside in order to re-read the novels that Brown analyzes in the book. There can hardly be a greater testament to a literary critic’s skill than her capacity to communicate to the reader her love and enthusiasm for the texts she analyzes. Brown’s central argument in Calila is that Martín Gaite’s novels of the 1990s deserve to be read, and the book will, without a doubt, bring new and returning readers and inspire renewed critical interest in the writer’s later work." * Hispania *"This insightful monograph on Martín Gaite’s final six novels is part-literary criticism and part-personal anecdote based on the extended friendship between the author and Brown who draws from a variety of scholarly sources, personal correspondence and photographs to provide readings of her works." * Anales de la literatura española contemporánea *"Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martin Gaite is a fascinating window into the life and later works of one of the most eminent Spanish novelists of all times. Joan L. Brown combines relevant history, original analysis and personal anecdotes from 'Calila’s' personal letters into a compelling and delightful rendition." -- María-Luisa Guardiola * editor of the Royal Spanish Academy's critical edition of Antonio García Gutiérrez's El trovador *"Martín Gaite’s works are now studied all around the world, especially in further education establishments. More and more students are researching her latest novels and Calila will be an indispensable read as Brown combines the critical study of the author’s texts, with their socio-historical background, and a personal view of the process of writing." -- Maria-José Blanco * author of Life-writing in Carmen Martín Gaite’s Cuadernos de todo and her Novels of the 1990s *"As I read Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite, I had to battle the temptation to put the volume aside in order to re-read the novels that Brown analyzes in the book. There can hardly be a greater testament to a literary critic’s skill than her capacity to communicate to the reader her love and enthusiasm for the texts she analyzes. Brown’s central argument in Calila is that Martín Gaite’s novels of the 1990s deserve to be read, and the book will, without a doubt, bring new and returning readers and inspire renewed critical interest in the writer’s later work." * Hispania *"This insightful monograph on Martín Gaite’s final six novels is part-literary criticism and part-personal anecdote based on the extended friendship between the author and Brown who draws from a variety of scholarly sources, personal correspondence and photographs to provide readings of her works." * Anales de la literatura española contemporánea *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction: Calila and Her Later Novels 1 Backstory: Carmen Martín Gaite’s Earlier Life and Literature 2 Caperucita en Manhattan: A Young Adult Novel of Recovery 3 Nubosidad variable: Contemporary Feminism in Post-Transition Spain 4 La Reina de las Nieves: Rewriting a Tragedy of Spain’s Transition 5 Lo raro es vivir: Existential Questions in Uncertain Times 6 Irse de casa: Back to the Future in Democratic Spain 7 Los parentheses: Fractured Families in the Twenty-First Century Conclusion: The Later Novels and Martín Gaite’s Legacy Notes Works Cited Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhite Light: The Poetry of Alberto Blanco examines the interplay of complementary images and concepts in the award-winning Mexican writer's cycle of poems from 1979 to 2018. Blanco’s poetic trilogy A la luz de siempre is characterized by its broad range of form and subject and by the poet's own eclectic background as a chemist, maker of collages, and musician. Blanco speaks the language of the visual arts, science, mathematics, music, and philosophy, and creates work with deep interdisciplinary roots. This book explores how polarities such as space and place, reading and writing, sound and silence, visual and verbal representation, and faith and doubt are woven through A la luz de siempre. These complements reveal how Blanco’s poetry, like the phenomenon of white light, embraces paradox and transforms into something more than the sum of its disparate and polychromatic parts.Trade Review"The breadth and depth of interdisciplinary experience and influence in Alberto Blanco’s work could make approaching his poetry a daunting proposition. An accomplished artist and musician, trained chemist, and experienced translator, Blanco draws on a wide range of sources among which he rejects rigid boundaries. Ronald Friis provides not only an insightful tracing of influences, themes, and dynamics in Blanco’s poetry but also a well developed and integrated reading of critics and theory to accompany his analysis. The result is an intelligent, insightful, and accessible consideration of the work of one of Mexico’s most accomplished contemporary intellectuals, artists, and poets." -- Cecelia J. Cavanaugh * author of Lorca's Drawings and Poems: Forming the Eye of the Reader *"A thoughtfully organized, deep engagement that illuminates and contextualizes correspondences among Blanco’s works, as well as with his impressive constellation of literary, musical, artistic, scientific, and philosophical interlocutors, White Light serves in part as an introduction to Blanco’s decades-spanning oeuvre and as a compendium of references to secondary sources." -- Bruce Willis * author of Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations *"The breadth and depth of interdisciplinary experience and influence in Alberto Blanco’s work could make approaching his poetry a daunting proposition. An accomplished artist and musician, trained chemist, and experienced translator, Blanco draws on a wide range of sources among which he rejects rigid boundaries. Ronald Friis provides not only an insightful tracing of influences, themes, and dynamics in Blanco’s poetry but also a well developed and integrated reading of critics and theory to accompany his analysis. The result is an intelligent, insightful, and accessible consideration of the work of one of Mexico’s most accomplished contemporary intellectuals, artists, and poets." -- Cecelia J. Cavanaugh * author of Lorca's Drawings and Poems: Forming the Eye of the Reader *"A thoughtfully organized, deep engagement that illuminates and contextualizes correspondences among Blanco’s works, as well as with his impressive constellation of literary, musical, artistic, scientific, and philosophical interlocutors, White Light serves in part as an introduction to Blanco’s decades-spanning oeuvre and as a compendium of references to secondary sources." -- Bruce Willis * author of Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Chronology Introduction: Light Is Both Wave and Particle Alberto Blanco The Poems Cycles Polarities White Light 1 Image Collage Absence and NegationPoesía visual “Donner à voir” Ekphrasis The Constellation of the Rose 2 Space The Exergue Effect Time and Place Stamps Travel “Mapas” Montage and Movie Stars Three Spatial Strategies for Cuenta de los guías 3 Sound Sister Arts and Synesthesia Tempo, Rhythm, and Rhyme Musical Paratexts Silence 4 Texture Reading and Writing Writers Writing Readers Writing Writing HemispheresTaijitu The Third Half 5 Metaphysics Scientific Methods Observer Effects Crisis Lessons in Geometry Aura Genesis Faith Coda: Flight Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.Trade Review"Aesthetics/politics. Culture/economics. Poetics plus coffee-bananas-drugs. Local/global. Onto this complex backdrop, Nicholson ably unfolds a capacious account of Colombian writing—from before, during, and after the 'Gabo' phenomenon on through J. G. Vásquez’s fiction. A solidly researched, broad-ranging look at a troubled nation’s struggles for artistic expression and literary viability." -- Gene Bell-Villada * editor of Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez *"The Aesthetic Border follows critics working from a national tradition outwards to globalization and world literature, as opposed to others working on Latin America vis-à-vis the world. Engaging the works of representative authors, Nicholson brilliantly maps out the convergence and divergence of global and national discourses present in the Colombian literary canon." -- Camilo Malagón * assistant professor of Spanish, Ithaca College *"Aesthetics/politics. Culture/economics. Poetics plus coffee-bananas-drugs. Local/global. Onto this complex backdrop, Nicholson ably unfolds a capacious account of Colombian writing—from before, during, and after the 'Gabo' phenomenon on through J. G. Vásquez’s fiction. A solidly researched, broad-ranging look at a troubled nation’s struggles for artistic expression and literary viability." -- Gene Bell-Villada * editor of Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez *"The Aesthetic Border follows critics working from a national tradition outwards to globalization and world literature, as opposed to others working on Latin America vis-à-vis the world. Engaging the works of representative authors, Nicholson brilliantly maps out the convergence and divergence of global and national discourses present in the Colombian literary canon." -- Camilo Malagón * assistant professor of Spanish, Ithaca College *Table of ContentsPreface & Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Gabo Against the World: Gabriel García Márquez and the Poetics of Early Globalization 2. Literary Shipwrecks: Colombian Aesthetic Citizenship after García Márquez 3. Narrating Disruption: From the Novela de la Violencia to the Narco-novela 4. Recasting the Colombian National Story after the Inrush of the World Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that moment - from cultural appropriation to race essentialism to shifting models of the state - continue to resonate for contemporary discussions of race and literature in Canada. Larissa Lai takes up the term ""Asian Canadian"" as a term of emergence, in the sense that it is constantly produced differently, and always in relation to other terms - often ""whiteness"" but also Indigeneity, queerness, feminism, African Canadian, and Asian American. In the 1980s and 1990s, ""Asian Canadian"" erupted in conjunction with the post-structural recognition of the instability of the subject. But paradoxically it also came into being through activist work, and so depended on an imagined stability that never fully materialized. Slanting I, Imagining We interrogates this fraught tension and the relational nature of the term through a range of texts and events, including the Gold Mountain Blues scandal, the conference Writing Thru Race, and the self-writings of Evelyn Lau and Wayson Choy. Trade Review"'Slanting I, Imagining We' is a compelling and much-needed reappraisal of the formation of Asian Canadian literature by one of Canada's most accomplished and versatile writers and public intellectuals. Novelist, poet, and activist Larissa Lai's prose is fresh, readable, and engaging. Her discussion of the anti-racist work done by coalitions of people of colour, First Nations, and queer communities in the 1980s and 1990s reminds us of what is at stake in naming, representation, and nation building; of how the ghosts of the Vancouver riots of 1907 haunt the 'Too Asian' debates of 2010. Her critical readings of stories and poems by such writers as Garrett Engkent, Hiromi Goto, jam ismail, Rita Wong, Margaret Atwood, and Dionne Brand are illuminating, revealing the ways colonialism, appropriation, systems of categorization, and power continue to generate and construct identities and bodies in our globalized and digital world. Insightful, absorbing, and challenging--an invaluable addition to Asian North American, Canadian, gender, and cultural studies." -- Eleanor Ty, author of 'Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives'Table of Contents Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s by Larissa Lai Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction: Asian Canadian Ruptures, Contemporary Scandals 1. Strategizing the Body of History: Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects, and Marketing the Nation 2. The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder 3. Romancing the Anthology: Supplement, Relation, and Community Production 4. Future Orientations, Non-Dialectical Monsters: Storytelling Queer Utopias in Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child 5. Ethnic Ethics, Translational Excess: The Poetics of jam ismail and Rita Wong 6. The Cameras of the World: Race, Subjectivity, and the Spiritual, Collective Other in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For Conclusion: Community Action, Global Spillage: Writing the Race of Capital Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Reliving the Trenches, three plays written by returned soldiers who served in the Great War with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium appear in print for the first time. With a critical introduction that references the author's service files to establish the plays as memoirs, these plays are an important addition to Canadian literature of the Great War.Important but overlooked war memoirs that relive trench life and warfare as experienced by combat veterans, the three plays include The P.B.I., written and staged in 1920 by recently returned veterans at the University of Toronto. Parts of this play appeared in print in serial form in 1922. Glory Hole, written in 1929 by William Stabler Atkinson, and Dawn in Heaven, written and staged in Winnipeg in 1934 by Simon Jauvoish, have never been published. These plays impact Canadian literature and theatre history by revealing a body of previously unknown modernist writing, and they impact life writing studies by showing how memoirs can be concealed behind genre conventions. They offer fascinating details of the daily routines of the soldiers in the trenches by bringing them back to life in theatrical re-enactment.Table of Contents 1. Critical and Historical Introduction 2. Editorial Principles 3. Introduction to The P.B.I. 5. The P. B. I., or, Mademoiselle of Bully Grenay by H. B. Scudamore, H.W. Downie W.L. McGeary and H.R. Dillon 6. Introduction to Glory Hole 7. Glory Hole: A Play of 1914-18 by William Stabler Atkinson 8. Introduction to Dawn In Heaven 9. Dawn In Heaven by Simon Jauvoish Appendix One: The P.B.I. Program Appendix Two: War Service of The P.B.I. Authors and Cast Appendix Three: 'A Canadian Volunteer's Last Prayer,' a poem by Simon Jauvoish Works Cited

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary tradition. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Signposts and Scales Chapter 1 Scaling and Spacing the Genre: Transnationalism, Nationalism, and Regionalism Chapter 2 Tom King's John Wayne: Indigenous Perspectives on the Western Chapter 3 The Northwestern Cross: Christianity and Transnationalism in Early Canadian Westerns Chapter 4 From Law to Outlaw: The Second World War, Westerns, and the '40s Pulps Chapter 5 CanLit's Postmodern Westerns: Ghosts and the Cowgirl Riding Off into the Sunrise Chapter 6 Degeneration Through Violence: Contemporary Historical Westerns and Posthuman Horsemen Conclusion: Mining the Western in the 21st Century Bibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisBeginning in 1963 and continuing through the late 1980s, a loose coterie of like-minded Canadian poets challenged the conventions of writing and poetic meaning by fusing their practice with strategies from visual art, sound art, sculpture, instillation, and performance. They called it “borderblur”Borderblur Poetics traces the emergence and proliferation of this node of poetic activity, an avant-garde movement comprising concrete poetry, sound poetry, and kinetic poetry, practiced by poets and artists like bpNichol, bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Steve McCaffery, Penn Kemp, Ann Rosenberg, Gerry Shikatani, Shaunt Basmajian, among others.Author Eric Schmaltz demonstrates how these poets formed an alternative tradition, one that embraced intermediality to challenge the hegemony of Canadian literature established during the heydays of cultural nationalism. He shows the importance of intermediality as a driving cultural force and how its proliferation significantly altered Canadian cultural expression. Drawing on a combination of archival research, historical analysis, and literary criticism, Borderblur Poetics adds significant nuance to theories and criticisms of Canadian literature.

Read more less

Book SynopsisBeginning in 1963 and continuing through the late 1980s, a loose coterie of like-minded Canadian poets challenged the conventions of writing and poetic meaning by fusing their practice with strategies from visual art, sound art, sculpture, instillation, and performance. They called it "borderblur"Borderblur Poetics traces the emergence and proliferation of this node of poetic activity, an avant-garde movement comprising concrete poetry, sound poetry, and kinetic poetry, practiced by poets and artists like bpNichol, bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Steve McCaffery, Penn Kemp, Ann Rosenberg, Gerry Shikatani, Shaunt Basmajian, among others.Author Eric Schmaltz demonstrates how these poets formed an alternative tradition, one that embraced intermediality to challenge the hegemony of Canadian literature established during the heydays of cultural nationalism. He shows the importance of intermediality as a driving cultural force and how its proliferation significantly altered Canadian cultural expression. Drawing on a combination of archival research, historical analysis, and literary criticism, Borderblur Poetics adds significant nuance to theories and criticisms of Canadian literature.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSindiwe Magona is a celebrated South African writer, storyteller and motivational speaker known mainly for her autobiographies, biographies, novels, short stories, poetry and children’s books. I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays that highlight her engagement with writing that span the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid period and addresses themes such as HIV/Aids, language and culture, home and belonging. Magona worked as a teacher, domestic worker and spent two decades working for the United Nations in the United States of America. She has received many awards for her fierce and fearless writing ‘truth to power’. Her written work is often informed by her lived experience of being a black woman resisting subjugation and poverty. These essays bring to life many facets of Magona’s personal history as well as her deepest convictions, her love for her country and despair at the problems that continue to plague it, and her belief in her ability to activate change. They demonstrate Magona’s engaging storytelling and mastery of the essay form which serve as meaningful supplements to her fictional works, while simultaneously offering direct and insightful responses to the conditions that inspired them. Through her essays Magona offers a reimagining of a broken society and the role literature can play in casting new light on old wounds.Table of Contents Editor’s Introduction: I Write the Yawning Void – Renée Schatteman Author’s Introduction: Writing South Africa’s Yawning Void – Sindiwe Magona Part I: Coming to Writing Chapter 1 The Scars of Umlungu Chapter 2 Clawing at Stones Chapter 3 Finding My Way Home Chapter 4 It is in the Blood: Trauma and Memory in the South African Novel Part II: Writing About Pressing Issues Chapter 5 Address at the Funeral of a Young Woman Chapter 6 Do Not Choose Poverty Chapter 7 Cry, the Beloved Language Chapter 8 We Are All Racists! Part III: Writing About My Writing Chapter 9 Why I Wrote My Autobiographies Chapter 10 Why I Wrote Mother to Mother Chapter 11 Why I Wrote Beauty’s Gift Chapter 12 Why I Wrote Chasing the Tails of My Father’s Cattle Chapter 13 Why I Wrote When the Village Sleeps Chapter 14 Why I Write Children’s Stories Conclusion: A Tribute To Those Who Paved The Way: André Brink And Other S/Heroes Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisLemography is a unique collection of critical essays on Stanislaw Lem, writer and philosopher. Its aim is to introduce aspects of his work hitherto unknown or neglected by scholarship and evaluate his influence on twentieth-century literature and culture—and beyond. The book’s uniqueness is enhanced by the global makeup of the contributors who hail from Canada, United States, Great Britain, Germany, Croatia, Poland, Sweden and Finland. In all cases, these are scholars and translators who for many years have pursued, and in some cases defined, Lem scholarship. Rather than study Lem as a science fiction writer, each essay commands a wider sphere of reference in order to appraise Lem’s literary and philosophical contributions. Each focuses on a different novel (or set of novels) from the writer’s opus, examining them critically. Between them, the essays cover virtually all phases of Lem’s multidimensional career, ensuring comprehensive coverage.Trade ReviewReviews 'As Lem scholarship grows in size, readers will find plenty of well-articulated thought in these works to ponder upon.' Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction'Read Lem. And read Swirski. Or the other way around. Whichever way you do it, just do it.' The Montreal Review'Lemography and Swirski’s Philosopher of the Future are multi-faceted and original contributions.'Science Fiction Studies‘All in all, this is an excellent edited collection that deepens our understanding of Lem’s work and legacy, and it will hopefully spur further research into Lem’s oeuvre.’ Michael Godhe, Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Table of Contents Lem Redux: From Poland to the World - WACLAW M. OSADNIK and PETER SWIRSKI The Unknown Lem: Man From Mars, The Astronauts, The Magellan Nebula - PETER SWIRSKI Investigating the Investigation: Mystery Narratives in The Investigation and The Chain of Chance - DAVID SEED Embodiment Problems: Adapting Solaris to Film - NICHOLAS RUDDICK The Hilarious and Serious Teachings of Lem’s Robot Fables: The Cyberiad - BO PETTERSSON Literature, Futurology, or Philosophy? The Futurological Congress - IRIS VIDMAR and PETER SWIRSKI Problems and Dilemmas:Lem’s Golem XIV - VICTOR YAZNEVICH Lem, Cervantes, and Metafiction: Peace on Earth and Fiasco - KENNETH KRABBENHOFT Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez’s classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter. William Wootten explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The Alvarez Generation is an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide. A new Afterword contains important biographical information on Sylvia Plath and reflects on its implications both for the discussions contained in the book and for the study of Plath’s work more generally.Trade Review'A well-researched, gracefully-written and important book about a formative period in British and Irish poetry. Wootten has established himself as a fine critic.' Patrick McGuinness'The Alvarez Generation is an illuminating, provocative and important book... Though briefer, it is as significant as Blake Morrison’s The Movement.' Sean O'Brien'Wootten's account of the emergence and persistence of these tastes allows us to understand much of what happened in British poetry in the post-war era.'Justin Quinn, Times Literary Supplement'[As] "the serious gives way to ludic scepticism" in more and more contemporary poetry, it is good to be reminded of a time when much more seemed at stake.'Michael Daniels, PN ReviewTable of Contents Preface Part I 1. Beginnings: Oxford and Cambridge Poetry in the early 1950s 2. ‘A Violent Time’: Anti-Movement Poetry in the mid to late 1950s 3. In Opposite Directions: A. Alvarez and Thom Gunn 4. Against Gentility 5. On Being Serious 6. Anthology Making 7. First Reactions: 'The Review' Debate and the Initial Response to 'The New Poetry' Part II 8. Sylvia Plath Part III 9. Going to Extremes 10. ‘A Study of Suicide’ Part IV 11. ‘Against Extremism’ 12. Costing Seriousness 13. ‘I Don’t Like Dramatising Myself’: anti-confessionalism in the later poetry of Thom Gunn 14. 'Birthday Letters' 15. Geoffrey Hill’s New Poetry 16. Children of 'The New Poetry' Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisStanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future brings a welter of unknown elements of Lem’s life, career, and literary legacy to light. Part One traces the context of his cultural influence, telling the story of one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the century. It includes a comprehensive critical overview of Lem’s literary and philosophical oeuvre which comprises not only the classics like Solaris, but his untranslated first novels, realistic prose, experimental works, volumes of nonfiction, latter-day metafiction, as well as the final twenty years of polemics and essays. The critical and interpretive Part Two examines a range of Lem’s novels with a view to examining the intellectual vistas they open up before us. It focuses on several of Lem’s major but less studied books. “Game, Set, Lem” uses game theory to shed light on his arguably most surreal novel, the Kafkaesque and claustrophobic Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961). “Betrization Is the Worst Solution… Except for All Others” takes a close look at the quasi-utopia of Return From the Stars (1961) and at the concept of ethical cleansing and mandatory de-aggression. “Errare Humanum Est” focuses on the popular science thriller The Invincible (1964) in the context of evolution. “A Beachbook for Intellectuals” is a critical fugue on Lem’s medical thriller cum crime mystery, The Chain of Chance (1976). Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future closes with a two-part coda. “Fiasco” recapitulates and reflects on the literary and cognitive themes of Lem’s farewell novel, and “Happy End of the World!” reviews The Blink of an Eye, Lem’s farewell book of analyses and prognoses from the cusp of our millennium.Trade ReviewReviews 'An indispensable contribution to Lem studies. No critic is ever likely to do a better job of summarizing Lem’s entire oeuvre and meting out cognitive justice to this philosopher of the future than Swirski.' Nicholas Ruddick'A worthy addition to Lem criticism. Divided in three parts, a biographical section, essays on Lem’s work and a coda, and featuring eleven photographs, the work offers a panoramic view of Lem’s oeuvre and ideas.' Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction'Peter Swirski’s book is impressive: it demonstrates a grasp of a very large body of knowledge… Swirski conveys Lem thoroughly yet in the most entertaining way. This marriage of the heavy and the light, the profound and the playful, is a great achievement and mirrors the Polish master.' Michael Kandel, translator of major works of Stanislaw Lem including Fiasco, His Master's Voice, and The Cyberiad'An indispensable contribution to Lem studies. No critic is ever likely to do a better job of summarizing Lem’s entire oeuvre and meting out cognitive justice to this philosopher of the future than Swirski.' Nicholas Ruddick, author of Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel'Swirski does an amazing job… must-read not only for the admirers of Lem but for all who see literature and philosophy as relevant for what they tell us about ourselves.'Philosophy in Review'A great road map into the technological new world… Swirski added another layer to the portrait of the artist… conclusively seals his status as a world-wide leading expert on Lem.'The Montreal Review'Swirski does an admirable job bringing a wide range of disciplines to bear on the work of a thinker whose importance to fields as diverse as literature, science, and philosophy cannot be overestimated.'Science Fiction Studies‘Swirski approaches Lem’s fiction with accuracy, originality, and nuance, providing an inquisitive blueprint for further explorations into Lem’s work and into wider Science Fiction from a finely tuned, more practically minded, perspective.’ Joe Howsin, Fantastika Journal ‘It should also appeal to readers who have admired his work for a long time. In this sense, the monograph is both an introduction to and a thorough exploration of Lem’s oeuvre and intellectual legacy: a wonderful place for any scholar new to Lem to start.’ Michael Godhe, Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Table of ContentsCOGITO ERGO LEM A Hard Nut to Crack—Pas de Deux—The Blink of the Cosmic Eye PART I: BIOGRAPHY CHAPTER 1. LIFE AND TIMES A Master of Thrills and Chills—The Reading of This Book Is Good for You—Renaissance Polymath—Lemberg—Highcastle—Well Over 180—Operation Barbarossa—Jan Donabidowicz—Lvov to Cracow—Social Parasite—The Genre In Which I Write—Borges for the Space Age—A Writing Consortium—Wissenschaftskolleg—Away From the Typewriter—On the Sidelines—Encyclopedic Oracle CHAPTER 2. IN THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF BOOKS Ariadne’s Thread—The New World of Adventure—The Other Inner Planet—Different Face—Allegorical Pen—SimCity—Hylas and Philonous—The Tricky Relation—The Golden Phase—A Happy Ending—Ammer-Ka—Out Yonder In Space—Dicty—The Seat of His Pants—Of Extraterrestrial Origin—A Critical Point—Cat’s Cradle— Hypertrophic Trends—Hoary Fallacy—Homo Rationis Capax—Der Völkermord—The Thanatos Syndrome—After the Last Goosebump Has Vanished—The Entire Human Race—Trompe l’Oeil—LEM!—My Farewell—Moratorium—The World According to Lem—Man and Machine PART II: ESSAYS CHAPTER 3. GAME, SET, LEM Ariadne’s Thread—Cold War Hysteria—The Third Pentagon—Nuclear-age Quixote—The Lottery in Babylon—I-Guess-What-You-Guess-What-I-Guess—Barnaby the Scrivener—Whoops! Apocalypse!—The Mission—Minimax/Maximin—The Mission Game—Subjective Rationality—The Collusion Game—Dead Men Don’t Tell Lies—An Allegorical Everyman—The Decipherment of Linear B CHAPTER 4. BETRIZATION IS THE WORST SOLUTION… EXCEPT FOR ALL OTHERS Time Machine—Word Become Flesh—Defanging the Human Beast—La bête humaine—The Hobbesian Premise—It Can’t Happen Here—50-50—Bennett, Trimaldi and Zakharov—The Technological Grail—Less Than Human—Chihuahuas in Eden—Nietzschean Superman—Droids, Borgs, and Bots—One for the Old Generation, One for the New—D-i-s-a-s-t-e-r CHAPTER 5. ERRARE HUMANUM EST The Invincible Has Landed—Models of Inquiry—From Literature to Biterature—The Alien as Alien—Knowledge and Metaknowledge—Regis III—Part of the Landscape—Nature Plays Fair—Ch. I., Ch. Ph., Ch. T., Ch. B.—Omnia Vincit Armor—Dictyostelium discoideum—Overzealous Carpenters—The Infallible CHAPTER 6. A BEACHBOOK FOR INTELLECTUALS A Novel of Ideas—Gun for Hire—Whodunit with Probability as the Butler—The Devil’s Parody of the Movies—The Locked Room—Terrorism Is Not a Hardware Issue—Good Cop, Bad Cop—The Garden of Earthly Delights—You, Me, Pulsars, and the Page You’re Reading—Ladykillers—Hero or Not?—Runny Nose—A Writer for All Reasons PART III: CODA CHAPTER 7. FIASCO You’ll See the Quintans—The War of the Worlds—Intelligent and Electronic—Let’s Do It Our Way—Mark Tempe—The Digla—Crystal Ball—To Make a Long Story Short CHAPTER 8. HAPPY END OF THE WORLD! The Blink of an Eye—Glow-In-the-Dark Monkeys—Cerebroproteinal Neuroprocessor—Encyclopedia of Ignorance APPENDIX. STANISLAW LEM: BOOKS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Read more less

Book SynopsisMike Ashley's acclaimed history of science-fiction magazines comes to the 1980s with Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990. This volume charts a significant revolution throughout science fiction, much of which was driven by the alternative press, and by new editors at the leading magazines. The period saw the emergence of the cyberpunk movement, and the drive for what David Hartwell called 'The Hard SF Renaissance', which was driven from within Britain. Ashley plots the rise of many new authors in both strands: William Gibson, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, John Kessel, Pat Cadigan and Rudy Rucker in cyberpunk, and Stephen Baxter, Alistair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, Neal Asher and Robert Reed in hard sf. He also shows how the alternative magazines looked to support each other through alliances, which allowed them to share and develop ideas as science fiction evolved.Trade Review'The information Mike Ashley has put together is really astonishing: researchers of the field, and anyone who’s interested in popular fiction of the period are going to find this book an immense help.' Andy Sawyer'Ashley has a skilled historian’s sense of proportion... he picks up on the rise of various themes in science fiction and notes the importance of the blurring of the lines between genres… his work focuses on some of the most well-known aspects of science fiction literature.' Gary K. Wolfe, Locus'Ashley writes with skill, passion and insight. The excitement he feels for the genre is apparent on every page. The depth and breadth of the research is stunning, covering countries as diverse as Uruguay, Croatia, Finland – and even Mongolia, which had a pocketbook sf magazine between 1976 and 1990.' Mark Greener, Fortean Times‘Taken as a whole, Ashley’s ongoing history of the SF magazine is an astonishing achievement. This is vital work in uncovering and making available elements in the publishing history of SF that would otherwise be easily forgotten or neglected.’ Derek Johnston, Fantastika Journal 'Science Fiction Rebels fills a niche but tremendous void in SF scholarship of 80s literary magazines and history [...] Ashley gives other scholars of SF magazines valuable insight to the world of editing SF in one of the world’s most eclectic decades. Ashley makes Science Fiction Rebels a scholarly must-have for research and editorial history within 80s SF.'B.L. King, SFRA Review '[Science Fiction Rebels] is essential reading for anyone needing to make sense of a decade of competing obsessions and styles, complex emergent technologies and mounting financial pressures on publishers. Ashley has produced a fascinating chronicle, a piece of thorough and dazzling scholarship and an invaluable work of reference.' Andy Hedgecock, Foundation‘This fourth volume in Mike Ashley’s comprehensive chronology of the SF magazines offers more of what came before it: a breath-taking depth and breadth of SF knowledge written in clear, comprehensible prose by an experienced and capable writer of encyclopaedias and anthologies… these books represent a supreme effort of scholarship and history-making, and they will be an invaluable tool to academics and fans alike.’ John McLoughlin, FafnirTable of ContentsList of TablesPrefaceNote on TerminologyAcknowledgementsChronologyChapter 1: Before the Revolution: Bastion of ExcellenceChapter 2: The First Revolution: Cyberpunk Days The McCarthy Years The Impact of Omni Cyberpunk Daze The Analog Dimension Dozois in Charge Amazing RebirthChapter 3: The First Interlude: The Dark Corners Twilight Zone Horror StruckChapter 4: The Second Revolution: The British Hard-SF Renaissance Out of the Wilderness Interzone Beyond InterzoneChapter 5: The Second Interlude: Other Worlds Éire Canada Australia Far CornersChapter 6: The Third Rebellion: The SF Underground SF Renegades Dangerous PulphouseChapter 7: Postlude: Back to Basics Stuck on the Launch Pad Shared Worlds Small-Press Endeavours Magazine with a Mission A Qualified Success A Problem Shared … Chapter 8: EpilogueAppendix 1: Non-English-Language Science-Fiction MagazinesAppendix 2: Checklist of English-Language Science-Fiction MagazinesAppendix 3: Directory of Magazine Editors and PublishersAppendix 4: Directory of Magazine Cover ArtistsAppendix 5: Schedule of Magazine Circulation FiguresSelect BibliographyAddenda and CorrigendaIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.The fifteen essays collected in Hard Reading argue, first, that science fiction has its own internal rhetoric, relying on devices such as neologism, dialogism, semantic shifts, the use of unreliable narrators. It is a “high-information” genre which does not follow the Flaubertian ideal of le mot juste, “the right word”, preferring le mot imprévisible, “the unpredictable word”. Both ideals shun the facilior lectio, the “easy reading”, but for different reasons and with different effects.The essays argue further that science fiction derives much of its energy from engagement with vital intellectual issues in the “soft sciences”, especially history, anthropology, the study of different cultures, with a strong bearing on politics. Both the rhetoric and the issues deserve to be taken much more seriously than they have been in academia, and in the wider world. Each essay is further prefaced by an autobiographical introduction. These explain how the essays came to be written and in what ways they (often) proved controversial. They, and the autobiographical introduction to the whole book, create between them a memoir of what it was like to be a committed fan, from teenage years, and also an academic struggling to find a place, at a time when a declared interest in science fiction and fantasy was the kiss of death for a career in the humanities.Trade Review'Those unfamiliar with Shippey’s work in this area are in for a treat.' Edward James, Foundation'In Hard Reading, Shippey discusses a wide-ranging variety of authors whose work has a clearly unacknowledged Wellsian streak. As a collection of essays written over a period of the past fifty years or so, Shippey's book demonstrates an increasing density and intricacy of academic style and approaches practised in SF studies.'Oksana Blashkiv, The Wellsian: The Journal of the H.G. Wells Society'This is an engaging and thought-provoking (or debate-provoking) selection of work.' Jack Fennell, FantastikaTable of ContentsList of FiguresNote on ReferencesA Personal PrefaceWhat SF Is1 Coming Out of the Science Fiction Closet‘Learning to Read Science Fiction’2 Rejecting Gesture Politics‘Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition’3 Getting Away from the Facilior Lectio‘Semiotic Ghosts and Ghostlinesses in the Work of Bruce Sterling’SF and Change4 Getting Serious with the Fans‘Science Fiction and the Idea of History’5 Getting to Grips with the Issue of Cultures …‘Cultural Engineering: A Theme in Science Fiction’6 … And Not Fudging the Issue!‘“People are Plastic”: Jack Vance and the Dilemma of Cultural Relativism’7 SF Authors Really Mean what they Say‘Alternate Historians: Newt, Kingers, Harry and Me’8 A Revealing Failure by the Critics‘Kingsley Amis’s Science Fiction and the Problems of Genre’9 A Glimpse of Structuralist Possibility‘The Golden Bough and the Incorporations of Magic in Science Fiction’10 Serious Issues, Serious Traumas, Emotional Depth‘The Magic Art and the Evolution of Words: Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” Trilogy’SF and Politics11 A First Encounter with Politics‘The Cold War in Science Fiction, 1940–1960’12 Language Corruption, and Rocking the Boat‘Variations on Newspeak: The Open Question of Nineteen Eighty-Four’13 Just Before the Disaster‘The Fall of America in Science Fiction’14 Why Politicians, and Producers, Should Read Science Fiction‘The Critique of America in Contemporary Science Fiction’15 Saying (When Necessary) the Lamentable Word‘Starship Troopers, Galactic Heroes, Mercenary Princes: The Military and its Discontents in Science Fiction’ReferencesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the wake of the Second World War, ideas of Europe abounded. What did Europe mean as a concept, and what did it mean to be European? Europeanising Spaces in Paris, c. 1947-1962 makes the case that Paris was both a leading and distinctive forum for the expression of these ideas in the post-war period. It examines spaces in the French capital in which ideas about Europe were formulated, articulated, exchanged, circulated, and contested during this post-war period, roughly between the escalation of the Cold War and the end of France's war of decolonisation in Algeria.Such processes of making sense of Europe are elucidated in urban, political and cultural spaces in the French capital. Specifically, the Parisian café, home and street are each examined in terms of how they were implicated in ideas about Europe. Then, the Paris-based Mouvement socialiste des états unis d'Europe (The Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe) and the far-right wing Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (The Federation of Nationalist Students) are examined as examples of political movements that mobilised around – very different – concepts of Europe. The final section on cultural Europeanising spaces draws attention to the specificities of the Europeanism of exiles from Franco's Spain in Paris; the work of the great scholar of the Arab world, Jacques Berque, in the context of his understanding of the Mediterranean world and his understanding of faith; and finally, the work of the legendary photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, by looking at the capacities and limitations of the photographic medium for the representation of Europe, and how these corresponded with Cartier-Bresson’s political, social, and aesthetic commitments.Trade ReviewReviews 'An original, penetrating and unusually wide-ranging text, that has much to say about a variety of debates both on, and well beyond, the ostensible focus on the idea of Europe.'Dr Daniel Alexander Gordon, Edge Hill University'As someone who teaches a course on the idea of Europe, I appreciate how the author chronicles the formulation and contestation of ideas about identity and place with well-researched concrete examples. I look forward to adding the book to the required reading for the course. The vignettes are intriguing: the story of exiles from Franco’s Spain in Paris; the work of the scholar of the Arab world Jacques Berques; and the work of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose photos of Paris are iconic. Each vignette clearly shows how cultural spaces in Paris were implicated in aspects of Europeanism and raised issues about who constituted an insider and outsider.'Kolleen M. Guy, University of Texas at San Antonio, H-FranceTable of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Figures Introduction: Europeanising Spaces in Paris, ca. 1947-1962 Section 1. Paris as a Europeanising Space Chapter 1. The Paris Café as a Europeanising Space Chapter 2. The Paris Home as a Europeanising Space Chapter 3. The Paris Street as a Europeanising Space Section 2. Political Europeanising Spaces in Paris Chapter 4. Europeanising Spaces and the Mouvement socialiste des états-unis d’Europe, ca. 1947-1954 Chapter 5. Europeanising Spaces and the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes 1960-1963 Section 3. Cultural Europeanising Spaces in Paris Chapter 6. Cultural Europeanising Spaces of Spanish Exiles in Paris Chapter 7. Europeanising Spaces in the Work of Jacques Berque Chapter 8. Europeanising Spaces in the Work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1948-1955 Conclusion Bibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisTouchstones examines the ways in which John McGahern became a writer through his reading. This reading, it is shown, was both extensive and intensive, and tended towards immersion in the classics. As such, new insights are provided into McGahern’s admiration and use of writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, William Blake, James Joyce, Albert Camus and several others. Evidence for these claims is found both through close reading of McGahern’s published texts as well as unprecedented sleuthing in his extensive archive of papers held at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The ultimate intention of the book is to draw attention to the very literary and writerly nature of McGahern as an artist, and to place him, not just as a great Irish writer, but as part of a long and venerable European tradition.Trade ReviewReviews 'Well-organized, well-written, passionate when needed, and intensely readable... I was thrilled to find so much that is new in Shovlin’s study.' Eamonn Wall, Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies, University of Missouri-St. Louis'Frank Shovlin elegantly and insightfully weaves a tapestry of allusions and linkages around [McGahern's] work.'Ruth Gilligan, Times Literary Supplement'This is a smart, convincing, and approachable study. ... Frank Shovlin’s Touchstones gives abundant insights into how this art came about and as such makes for an ideal introduction to the various influences and precedents at play in John McGahern’s impressive fictional world.'Gerald Dawe, Irish University ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Abbreviations Touching Stones: Matthew Arnold and the Canon 1 We Other Clerks: James Joyce and the Classical Temper 2 A Walking Mirror: Stendhal, Horace, Nietzsche 3 One lone paperback: Tolstoy and Religious Sensibility 4 Magic: The Centrality of W. B. Yeats 5 Instinct: Douglas Stewart and Sex 6 The fume of muscatel: Yeats's Ghosts 7 Bohemian Rhapsody: Patrick Kavanagh and Generation X 8 Absurdity: Camus comes to Clones 9 Aristocracy: Andrew Marvell, W. B. Yeats and the Curse of Cromwell 10 The Consolations of Nothingness: William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Prayer 11 Deliberate Happiness: W. B. Yeats and the Inner Life 12 Stranger in Paradise: Dante and Epic Style Conclusion: What Then? Bibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisPacifist Invasions is about what happens to the francophone lyric in the translingual Franco-Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it demonstrates how Arabic literature and Islamic scripture pacifically invade French in the poetry of Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan). Pacifist Invasions deploys side-by-side comparisons of classical Arabic literature, Islamic scripture, and the Arabic commentary traditions in the original language against the landscapes of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature, poetry, and poetics. Detailed close readings reveal three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into the French lyric, and the mechanisms by which poets foreignize French, as they engage in a translational and intertextual relationship with the history and world of Arabic literature.Through fine-grained analyses of poetry, translations, commentaries, chapbooks, art books, and essays, Pacifist Invasions proposes a cross-cultural history and rereading of French and francophone literatures in relation to the transversal translations and transmissions of classical Arabic poetics. It offers a translingual, comparative repositioning of the field of francophone postcolonial studies along a fluid, translational Franco-Arabic axis. The vision of the postfrancophone succeeds the point of exhaustion within the French poetic sociolect, with wide-ranging and surprising implications for the study of French and francophone poetry.Trade ReviewReviews 'Pacifist Invasions will be of major importance to scholars of postcolonial francophone literature and intervenes in important ways in ongoing debates on world literature.'Olivia Harrison, University of Southern California'Elegant, textured, and richly insightful, yasser elhariry’s book nimbly explores Franco-Arab writers who infuse French poetry with Arabic cultural traditions. Helpfully delineating major Arabic forms that go back many centuries, Elhariry examines how contemporary poets intertextually and interlingually intertwine them with French. They remake the landscape of French poetry, unleashing new possibilities by their reverse colonization of French with the idioms, forms, and spirituality of Muslim Arab lands. An important study of a fascinatingly translingual and intercultural body of work.'Jahan Ramazani, editor ofThe Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial PoetryTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsNote on TranslationsPreface // Ends of FrenchIntroduction // Word Over WordPart One // Odists 1 Translating Translating Tengour 2 Sky-Birds & Dead Trees: On Two Images in Edmond JabèsPart Two // Sufis 3 Wine Song: Salah Stétié & ʿOmar ibn al-Fārid 4 Sufis in Mecca: Abdelwahab Meddeb, Ibn ʿArabī, & the New LyricPart Three // Andalusians 5 Heliotropic Exit: Ryoko Sekiguchi’s MuwashshahConclusion // PostfrancophoneNotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisJoseph Zobel (1915-2006) is one of the best-known Francophone Caribbean authors, and is internationally recognised for his novel La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950). Yet very little is known about his other novels, and most readings of La Rue Cases-Nègres consider the text in isolation. Through a series of close readings of the author’s six published novels, with supporting references drawn from his published short stories, poetry and diaries, Joseph Zobel: Négritude and the Novel generates new insights into Zobel’s highly original decision to develop Négritude’s project of affirming pride in black identity through the novel and social realism. The study establishes how, influenced by the American Harlem Renaissance movement, Zobel expands the scope of Négritude by introducing new themes and stylistic innovations which herald a new kind of social realist French Caribbean literature. These discoveries in turn challenge and alter the current understanding of Francophone Caribbean literature during the Négritude period, in addition to contributing to changes in the current understanding of Caribbean and American literature more broadly understood.Trade Review'Louise Hardwick's Joseph Zobel: Negritude and the Novel is a remarkable and timely examination one of the key authors of francophone postcolonial writing. With exacting scholarship and empassioned prose, Hardwick reveals the full complexity of Zobel's extensive novelistic enterprise, including the many twists and turns of the rewritings of his earlier works. [...] Hardwick's groundbreaking research reveals long-forgotten texts, biographical intricacies, and political and aesthetic debates to finally and rightfully accord Zobel recognition as one of the central and most original figures of Négritude.'Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University'Through settings, characterizations, and themes, Zobel's work confronts France's political and cultural grip in Martinique, giving voice to destitute blacks. Benefiting from Hardwick's translations, this is a valuable addition to the literature on postcolonialism.' D. M. Jarrett, Choice'It is one of the many strengths of this study that it situates that novel in its rightful relationship with the rest of Zobel’s work, which includes journalism, short stories, poetry, spoken word, radio, sculpture, and painting. This meticulously researched book persuasively makes the case for Zobel as a key and necessary figure in any understanding of the evolution of Francophone Caribbean literature and culture in the twentieth century.' Martin Munro, H-France'This monograph, which will prove to be a catalyst for further research into postcolonial literature, should be required reading by both academics and students, and is a valuable and original contribution to the field of Caribbean studies.'Maeva McComb, French StudiesTable of ContentsIntroductionChapter 1: Zobel, Négritude and the NovelChapter 2: Earth, Ecocriticism and Economics: Diab’-làChapter 3: Nothing Happens, Twice: Les Jours immobiles becomes Les Mains pleines d’oiseauxChapter 4: Re-reading La Rue Cases-NègresChapter 5: Cultural Capital in the French Capital: Quand la neige aura fonduAfterwordBibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisPart comedy, part thriller, part social critique, The Granny and the Heist (La estanquera de Vallecas) is the play with which José Luis Alonso de Santos reinvigorated the Spanish stage during a period of uncertainty upon the death of Francisco Franco and the end of theatre censorship. Premiered in 1981, it established Alonso de Santos as the most important playwright in Spain at a time when the country was emerging from decades of relative isolation from the rest of Europe.Set in a working class area of Madrid, the play tells the story of Leandro and Tocho, two out of work builders whose plan to rob a tobacconists goes awry due to the refusal of its owner, feisty grandmother Justa, to hand over the money. Barricading themselves in the shop as the forces of order arrive, the men take Justa and her granddaughter Ángeles hostage. In the stand-off that ensues, Alonso de Santos deftly interweaves tense excitement, comic banter and moments of great tenderness, eliciting our sympathy for the residents of the Vallecas neighbourhood, equally ignored by Spain’s nascent democracy as they had been under the dictatorship.This edition features Stuart Green’s facing page translation, as well as a critical introduction that provides readers with knowledge of the historical and cultural context in which the play was written and performed. The edition also includes an extensive collection of classroom activities especially designed by Lucy Meyer and Stuart Green to enable secondary school and university teachers to use the play, its translation and other authentic materials to teach a variety of linguistic and grammatical features of Spanish in all four skills areas in language learning.Table of ContentsIntroduction There’s no-one quite like Grandma 1 Vallecas: from village to neighbourhood and on stage 2 Plot summary 5 Alonso de Santos and the theatre of his time: playwriting and politics 7 La estanquera de Vallecas: a blend of sainete and the picaresque 13 Characters 20 Premiere(s): critical and commercial reaction 28 Notes on the translation 32 Acknowledgements 35 Translator's Note 35 Bibliography 36 La estanquera de Vallecas / The Granny and the Heist 39 Teaching Resources Introduction 138 Addressing any concerns 139 Teaching and learning objectives 140 Skills activities 142 Speaking 142 Listening 151 Reading 153 Writing 155 Research project 159 Performance 160 Lesson sequence 163 Entrevista con Beatriz Bergamín / Interview with Beatriz Bergamín 166 Transcriptions of videoclips 172 Photographs from the 1985 stage production 176 Sample student work 178 Answers to questions 189

Read more less

Book SynopsisPart comedy, part thriller, part social critique, The Granny and the Heist (La estanquera de Vallecas) is the play with which José Luis Alonso de Santos reinvigorated the Spanish stage during a period of uncertainty upon the death of Francisco Franco and the end of theatre censorship. Premiered in 1981, it established Alonso de Santos as the most important playwright in Spain at a time when the country was emerging from decades of relative isolation from the rest of Europe.Set in a working class area of Madrid, the play tells the story of Leandro and Tocho, two out of work builders whose plan to rob a tobacconists goes awry due to the refusal of its owner, feisty grandmother Justa, to hand over the money. Barricading themselves in the shop as the forces of order arrive, the men take Justa and her granddaughter Ángeles hostage. In the stand-off that ensues, Alonso de Santos deftly interweaves tense excitement, comic banter and moments of great tenderness, eliciting our sympathy for the residents of the Vallecas neighbourhood, equally ignored by Spain’s nascent democracy as they had been under the dictatorship.This edition features Stuart Green’s facing page translation, as well as a critical introduction that provides readers with knowledge of the historical and cultural context in which the play was written and performed. The edition also includes an extensive collection of classroom activities especially designed by Lucy Meyer and Stuart Green to enable secondary school and university teachers to use the play, its translation and other authentic materials to teach a variety of linguistic and grammatical features of Spanish in all four skills areas in language learning.Table of ContentsIntroduction There’s no-one quite like Grandma 1 Vallecas: from village to neighbourhood and on stage 2 Plot summary 5 Alonso de Santos and the theatre of his time: playwriting and politics 7 La estanquera de Vallecas: a blend of sainete and the picaresque 13 Characters 20 Premiere(s): critical and commercial reaction 28 Notes on the translation 32 Acknowledgements 35 Translator's Note 35 Bibliography 36 La estanquera de Vallecas / The Granny and the Heist 39 Teaching Resources Introduction 138 Addressing any concerns 139 Teaching and learning objectives 140 Skills activities 142 Speaking 142 Listening 151 Reading 153 Writing 155 Research project 159 Performance 160 Lesson sequence 163 Entrevista con Beatriz Bergamín / Interview with Beatriz Bergamín 166 Transcriptions of videoclips 172 Photographs from the 1985 stage production 176 Sample student work 178 Answers to questions 189

Read more less

Book SynopsisLove on the Dole (1933), the iconic novel about 1930s British working-class life, has a significant place in British cultural history. Its author, Walter Greenwood, went from unemployed Salford man to best-selling writer, and the novel has never been out of print. The 1935 stage adaptation was said to have been seen by three million people by 1940, including the King and Queen. Greenwood proposed a film adaption in 1936, but the story was pronounced too `sordid' and depressing' by the British Board of Film Censors. However, in 1940 the Ministry of Information decided that this story of pre-war economic and social failure should be filmed as a contribution to the `people's war'. It was widely regarded as one of the best British wartime productions - and all three versions of Love on the Dole were frequently referenced during wartime debate about how a reconstructed post-war society should make a repetition of the 1930s impossible. This study explores in detail what made this important text so influential, analyses the considerable differences between the novel, play and film versions and places the public response to Love on the Dole in its full historical context. It examines Greenwood's whole literary career and his continuing success until the 1960s: casting new light on his subsequent novels, plays and non-fiction works, few of which have received critical attention.Trade Review'A fascinating, comprehensive and vital study. It rehabilitates Greenwood as an artist, it analyses 1930s' culture, and it provides some engaging reflections on the history of Salford.' Dr Claire Warden, Reader in Drama, De Montfort UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1. Love on the Dole: Novel 2. Love on the Dole: Play and Film 3. Walter Greenwood: Life and Writings Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisCosta Rica is a country known internationally for its eco-credentials, dazzling coastlines, and reputation as one of the happiest and most peaceful nations on earth. Beneath this façade, however, lies an exclusionary rhetoric of nationalism bound up in the concept of the tico, as many Costa Ricans refer to themselves. Beginning by considering the very idea of national identity and what this constitutes, this book explores the nature of the idealised tico identity, demonstrating the ways in which it has assumed a white supremacist, Central Valley-centric, patriarchal, heteronormative stance based on colonial ideals. Chapters two and three then go on to consider the literature and films produced that stand in opposition to this normative image of who or what is tico and their creation as vehicles of soft power which aim to question social norms. This book explores protest literature from the 1970s by Quince Duncan, Carmen Naranjo, and Alfonso Chase who narrate their experiences from the margins of society by virtue of their identity as Afro-Costa Rican, feminist, and homosexual authors. Cinema from the twenty-first century is then analysed to demonstrate the nuanced position chosen by national directors Esteban Ramírez, Paz Fábrega, Jurgen Ureña, and Patricia Velásquez to challenge the dominant nation-image as they reinscribe youth culture, a female consciousness, trans identity, and Afro-Costa Rica onto the fabric of the nation.Trade Review‘Throughout the book, Harvey-Kattou offers clear, concise readings on film and literature to articulate new models of Costa Rican belonging and national identity.’ Stephanie M. Pridgeon, Bulletin of Spanish StudiesTable of ContentsContentsIntroductionChapter One: The Creation of Tiquicidad and Theories of National IdentityChapter Two: Coded Messages: Costa Rican Protest Literature 1970–1985Chapter Three: Reflecting the Nation: Costa Rican Cinema in the Twenty–First CenturyConclusion

Read more less

Book SynopsisLemography is a unique collection of critical essays on Stanislaw Lem, writer and philosopher. Its aim is to introduce aspects of his work hitherto unknown or neglected by scholarship and evaluate his influence on twentieth-century literature and culture—and beyond. The book’s uniqueness is enhanced by the global makeup of the contributors who hail from Canada, United States, Great Britain, Germany, Croatia, Poland, Sweden and Finland. In all cases, these are scholars and translators who for many years have pursued, and in some cases defined, Lem scholarship. Rather than study Lem as a science fiction writer, each essay commands a wider sphere of reference in order to appraise Lem’s literary and philosophical contributions. Each focuses on a different novel (or set of novels) from the writer’s opus, examining them critically. Between them, the essays cover virtually all phases of Lem’s multidimensional career, ensuring comprehensive coverage.Trade ReviewReviews 'As Lem scholarship grows in size, readers will find plenty of well-articulated thought in these works to ponder upon.' Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction'Read Lem. And read Swirski. Or the other way around. Whichever way you do it, just do it.' The Montreal Review'Lemography and Swirski’s Philosopher of the Future are multi-faceted and original contributions.'Science Fiction Studies‘All in all, this is an excellent edited collection that deepens our understanding of Lem’s work and legacy, and it will hopefully spur further research into Lem’s oeuvre.’ Michael Godhe, Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Table of Contents Lem Redux: From Poland to the World - WACLAW M. OSADNIK and PETER SWIRSKI The Unknown Lem: Man From Mars, The Astronauts, The Magellan Nebula - PETER SWIRSKI Investigating the Investigation: Mystery Narratives in The Investigation and The Chain of Chance - DAVID SEED Embodiment Problems: Adapting Solaris to Film - NICHOLAS RUDDICK The Hilarious and Serious Teachings of Lem’s Robot Fables: The Cyberiad - BO PETTERSSON Literature, Futurology, or Philosophy? The Futurological Congress - IRIS VIDMAR and PETER SWIRSKI Problems and Dilemmas:Lem’s Golem XIV - VICTOR YAZNEVICH Lem, Cervantes, and Metafiction: Peace on Earth and Fiasco - KENNETH KRABBENHOFT Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisStanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future brings a welter of unknown elements of Lem’s life, career, and literary legacy to light. Part One traces the context of his cultural influence, telling the story of one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the century. It includes a comprehensive critical overview of Lem’s literary and philosophical oeuvre which comprises not only the classics like Solaris, but his untranslated first novels, realistic prose, experimental works, volumes of nonfiction, latter-day metafiction, as well as the final twenty years of polemics and essays. The critical and interpretive Part Two examines a range of Lem’s novels with a view to examining the intellectual vistas they open up before us. It focuses on several of Lem’s major but less studied books. “Game, Set, Lem” uses game theory to shed light on his arguably most surreal novel, the Kafkaesque and claustrophobic Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961). “Betrization Is the Worst Solution… Except for All Others” takes a close look at the quasi-utopia of Return From the Stars (1961) and at the concept of ethical cleansing and mandatory de-aggression. “Errare Humanum Est” focuses on the popular science thriller The Invincible (1964) in the context of evolution. “A Beachbook for Intellectuals” is a critical fugue on Lem’s medical thriller cum crime mystery, The Chain of Chance (1976). Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future closes with a two-part coda. “Fiasco” recapitulates and reflects on the literary and cognitive themes of Lem’s farewell novel, and “Happy End of the World!” reviews The Blink of an Eye, Lem’s farewell book of analyses and prognoses from the cusp of our millennium.Trade ReviewReviews 'An indispensable contribution to Lem studies. No critic is ever likely to do a better job of summarizing Lem’s entire oeuvre and meting out cognitive justice to this philosopher of the future than Swirski.' Nicholas Ruddick'A worthy addition to Lem criticism. Divided in three parts, a biographical section, essays on Lem’s work and a coda, and featuring eleven photographs, the work offers a panoramic view of Lem’s oeuvre and ideas.' Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction'Peter Swirski’s book is impressive: it demonstrates a grasp of a very large body of knowledge… Swirski conveys Lem thoroughly yet in the most entertaining way. This marriage of the heavy and the light, the profound and the playful, is a great achievement and mirrors the Polish master.' Michael Kandel, translator of major works of Stanislaw Lem including Fiasco, His Master's Voice, and The Cyberiad'An indispensable contribution to Lem studies. No critic is ever likely to do a better job of summarizing Lem’s entire oeuvre and meting out cognitive justice to this philosopher of the future than Swirski.' Nicholas Ruddick, author of Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel'Swirski does an amazing job… must-read not only for the admirers of Lem but for all who see literature and philosophy as relevant for what they tell us about ourselves.'Philosophy in Review'A great road map into the technological new world… Swirski added another layer to the portrait of the artist… conclusively seals his status as a world-wide leading expert on Lem.'The Montreal Review'Swirski does an admirable job bringing a wide range of disciplines to bear on the work of a thinker whose importance to fields as diverse as literature, science, and philosophy cannot be overestimated.'Science Fiction Studies‘Swirski approaches Lem’s fiction with accuracy, originality, and nuance, providing an inquisitive blueprint for further explorations into Lem’s work and into wider Science Fiction from a finely tuned, more practically minded, perspective.’ Joe Howsin, Fantastika Journal ‘It should also appeal to readers who have admired his work for a long time. In this sense, the monograph is both an introduction to and a thorough exploration of Lem’s oeuvre and intellectual legacy: a wonderful place for any scholar new to Lem to start.’ Michael Godhe, Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Table of ContentsCOGITO ERGO LEM A Hard Nut to Crack—Pas de Deux—The Blink of the Cosmic Eye PART I: BIOGRAPHY CHAPTER 1. LIFE AND TIMES A Master of Thrills and Chills—The Reading of This Book Is Good for You—Renaissance Polymath—Lemberg—Highcastle—Well Over 180—Operation Barbarossa—Jan Donabidowicz—Lvov to Cracow—Social Parasite—The Genre In Which I Write—Borges for the Space Age—A Writing Consortium—Wissenschaftskolleg—Away From the Typewriter—On the Sidelines—Encyclopedic Oracle CHAPTER 2. IN THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF BOOKS Ariadne’s Thread—The New World of Adventure—The Other Inner Planet—Different Face—Allegorical Pen—SimCity—Hylas and Philonous—The Tricky Relation—The Golden Phase—A Happy Ending—Ammer-Ka—Out Yonder In Space—Dicty—The Seat of His Pants—Of Extraterrestrial Origin—A Critical Point—Cat’s Cradle— Hypertrophic Trends—Hoary Fallacy—Homo Rationis Capax—Der Völkermord—The Thanatos Syndrome—After the Last Goosebump Has Vanished—The Entire Human Race—Trompe l’Oeil—LEM!—My Farewell—Moratorium—The World According to Lem—Man and Machine PART II: ESSAYS CHAPTER 3. GAME, SET, LEM Ariadne’s Thread—Cold War Hysteria—The Third Pentagon—Nuclear-age Quixote—The Lottery in Babylon—I-Guess-What-You-Guess-What-I-Guess—Barnaby the Scrivener—Whoops! Apocalypse!—The Mission—Minimax/Maximin—The Mission Game—Subjective Rationality—The Collusion Game—Dead Men Don’t Tell Lies—An Allegorical Everyman—The Decipherment of Linear B CHAPTER 4. BETRIZATION IS THE WORST SOLUTION… EXCEPT FOR ALL OTHERS Time Machine—Word Become Flesh—Defanging the Human Beast—La bête humaine—The Hobbesian Premise—It Can’t Happen Here—50-50—Bennett, Trimaldi and Zakharov—The Technological Grail—Less Than Human—Chihuahuas in Eden—Nietzschean Superman—Droids, Borgs, and Bots—One for the Old Generation, One for the New—D-i-s-a-s-t-e-r CHAPTER 5. ERRARE HUMANUM EST The Invincible Has Landed—Models of Inquiry—From Literature to Biterature—The Alien as Alien—Knowledge and Metaknowledge—Regis III—Part of the Landscape—Nature Plays Fair—Ch. I., Ch. Ph., Ch. T., Ch. B.—Omnia Vincit Armor—Dictyostelium discoideum—Overzealous Carpenters—The Infallible CHAPTER 6. A BEACHBOOK FOR INTELLECTUALS A Novel of Ideas—Gun for Hire—Whodunit with Probability as the Butler—The Devil’s Parody of the Movies—The Locked Room—Terrorism Is Not a Hardware Issue—Good Cop, Bad Cop—The Garden of Earthly Delights—You, Me, Pulsars, and the Page You’re Reading—Ladykillers—Hero or Not?—Runny Nose—A Writer for All Reasons PART III: CODA CHAPTER 7. FIASCO You’ll See the Quintans—The War of the Worlds—Intelligent and Electronic—Let’s Do It Our Way—Mark Tempe—The Digla—Crystal Ball—To Make a Long Story Short CHAPTER 8. HAPPY END OF THE WORLD! The Blink of an Eye—Glow-In-the-Dark Monkeys—Cerebroproteinal Neuroprocessor—Encyclopedia of Ignorance APPENDIX. STANISLAW LEM: BOOKS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Read more less

Book SynopsisPoetry is an ancient verbal art, which has its roots in the oral epics and fragments that survive from classical times. Dictionaries of English, by contrast, are a comparatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the ‘hard words’ that Robert Cawdrey gathered in A Table Alphabeticall in 1604 and extending to the present edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, with its ongoing revisions. This innovative collection of essays is the first volume to explore the ways in which dictionaries have stimulated the imaginations of modern and contemporary poets from Britain, Ireland, and America, while also considering how poetry has itself been a rich source of material for lexicographers. As well as gauging the influence of major dictionaries like the OED, the essays single out encounters with more specialised works and broach uses of words that are not typically included in dictionaries. In doing so, the contributors not only cast familiar questions of ambiguity and etymology in a fresh light, but they also reveal a number of surprising and energising points of contact, from Hugh MacDiarmid’s rediscovery of Scots to Tina Darragh’s visual appropriations of dictionary pages. As such, Poetry & the Dictionary will prove an indispensable volume for all readers – academic or not – who find themselves fascinated by the language’s many involutions.Trade ReviewReviews ‘This fascinating collection of essays offers a set of new perspectives on experimental poetics as a tradition and as a current practice. This will be a book of substantial interest to scholars, critics, students and readers of contemporary poetry.’ Professor Andrew Roberts, University of Dundee'This collection affords the poet, the lexicographer, and the literary scholar a fruitful and rich cross-disciplinary dive into the mechanics of both language and lyricism... a worthy collection of essays.'D. A. Lockhart, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America'Readers who want to know about W.H. Auden's "love affair with the OED" (p. 83) will find enlightenment here, while the poems and essays of T.S. Eliot are individually indexed in a highly professional index at the back of the book. [...] Equally rewarding for the curious reader is Tara Stubbs's essay on Marianne Moore, an American poet of the early 20th-century.' Patrick Hanks, International Journal of Lexicography'For readers willing to engage with this more academic text, Poetry & the Dictionary will provide a degree of poetic and intellectual investigation that may ultimately lead to polyvocal poetry.’ Renée M. Sgroi, Carousel Magazine'Looking through a … broader scope, Piers Pennington and Andrew Blades's Poetry & the Dictionary tracks the centuries-long relationship between the terms of their book's title … remind[ing] us that the dictionary itself cannot be "depersonalized," that no "picture" it presents is necessarily clear.' Chelsie Malyszek, LA Review of BooksTable of ContentsPart 1: Poetry and the Dictionary1. IntroductionAndrew Blades and Piers Pennington2. ‘When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary’: Poets and Dictionaries, Dictionaries and PoetsCharlotte Brewer3. Poetry in the Oxford English Dictionary: A Quantitative ProfileDavid-Antoine Williams4. Lexicography in Modern PoetryMatthew SperlingPart 2: British and Irish Poetry and the Dictionary5. Jamieson, Jargons, Jangles, and Jokes: Hugh MacDiarmid and DictionariesMichael Whitworth6. Not even inventedDeborah Bowman7. Proper Names, the Dictionary, and the Poetry of ExperimentPiers Pennington8. Etymology and Elegy: Paul Muldoon’s ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’Mia GaudernPart 3: American Poetry and the Dictionary9. Briefer Mentions and Lyrical Lexicons: Marianne Moore’s Responses to Dictionaries in The Dial and ObservationsTara Stubbs 10. A Collected Unconscious: James Merrill’s DictionariesAndrew Blades11. ‘All Things are Words of Some Strange Tongue’: Dictionary Definition Form in Contemporary American PoetryKate Potts12. Long Poems about Everything: Dictionary as Subject and Model for Poem, 1974–2016Giles Goodland

Read more less

Book SynopsisCriminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction offers a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about crime fiction. It seeks to overturn the following preconceptions: that the genre does not warrant critical analysis, that genre norms and conventions matter more than textual individuality, and that comparative perspectives are secondary to the study of the British-American canon. Criminal Moves challenges the distinction between literary and popular fiction and proposes that crime fiction be seen as constantly violating its own boundaries. Centred on three axes of mobility, the essays ask how can we imagine a mobile reading practice that realizes the genre’s full textual complexity, without being limited by the authoritative self-interpretations provided by crime narratives; how we can overcome restrictive notions of ‘genre’, ‘formula’ or ‘popular’; and how we can establish transnational perspectives that challenge the centrality of the British-American tradition and recognize that the global history of crime fiction is characterized, not by the existence of parallel national traditions, but rather by processes of appropriation and transculturation. Criminal Moves presents a comprehensive reinterpretation of the history of the genre that also has profound ramifications for how we read individual crime fiction texts.Trade ReviewReviews'The three editors of this rich collective volume are driven by the ambitious desire to radically revise crime fiction studies, sweeping away existing prejudices and providing a new conceptual framework to the study of the genre... in a few years, this work will be acknowledged as a turning point in the history of crime scholarship.'Stefano Serafini, Linguæ &'Criminal Moves is an excellent resource for scholars who are reconsidering how they research and teach foundational texts in the crime fiction genre. It can also help readers identify ways to analyse and appreciate transnational works outside of the traditional British-American canon without confining them to a fixed taxonomy.'Jennifer Schnabel, Crime Fiction Studies'Criminal Moves is an exciting venture. [...] It asks provocative questions about the transparency of narrative. [...] It is the reader, as consumer and companion of the detective and author, who is at the core of the experience. Also, the issue of the reader’s gaze and attention are important considerations.'Fred Isaac, CluesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Criminal Moves: Towards a Theory of Crime Fiction MobilityJesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistair RollsMobility of Meaning1. Behind the Locked Door: Leblanc, Leroux and the Anxieties of the Belle ÉpoqueJean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby2. Moving Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Breaking the Frame of Poe’s 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue’Alistair Rolls3. Reading Affects in Raymond Chandler’s The Big SleepHeta Pyrhönen4. Contradicting the Golden Age: Reading Agatha Christie in the Twenty-First CenturyMerja MakinenMobility of Genre5. Criminal Minds: Reassessing the Origins of the Psycho-ThrillerMaurizio Ascari6. Foggy Muddle: Narrative, Contingency and Genre Mobility in Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain CurseJesper Gulddal7. Burma’s Bagnoles: Urban Modernity and the Automotive Saccadism of Léo Malet’s Nouveaux mystères de Paris (1954-1959)Andrea Goulet8. Secrecy and Transparency in Hideo Yokoyama’s Six FourAndrew PepperTransnational Mobility9. The Reader and World Crime Fiction: The (Private) Eye of the BeholderStewart King10. From Vidocq to the Locked Room: International Connections in Nineteenth-Century Crime FictionStephen Knight11. Brain Attics and Mind Weapons: Investigative Spaces, Mobility and Transcultural Adaptations of Detective FictionMichael B. Harris-Peyton 

Read more less

Book SynopsisAnita Brookner was known for writing boring books about lonely, single women. Misreading Anita Brookner unlocks the mysteries of the famously depressed Brookner heroine by creating entirely new ways to read six Brookner novels.Drawing on Brookner’s legacy as a renowned historian of French Romantic art and on diverse intertextual sources from Charles Baudelaire to Henry James, Renée Vivien and Freud, this book argues that Brookner’s solitary twentieth-century women can also be seen as variations of queer nineteenth-century male artist archetypes. Conjuring a cast of Romantic personae including the flâneur, the dandy, the aesthete, the military man, the queer, the analysand, the degenerate and the storyteller, it illuminates clusters of nineteenth-century behaviours which help decode the lives of Brookner’s twentieth-century women. This exploration of Brookner’s ‘performative Romanticism’ exposes new depths within her outsider introverts, who are revealed as a subversive blend of the historical, the contemporary, the masculine and the feminine.Trade ReviewReviews ‘Anita Brookner deserves this detailed, sophisticated, brilliant reading that appreciates Brookner’s peculiar genius and uncovers the ways in which she “does indeed write a different kind of novel.” Given the intertextual, allusive nature of Brookner’s work and her extraordinary expertise on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art and literature, Dr Mayer’s “misreading” of Brookner’s “performative romanticism” is entirely appropriate.' Ann Holbrook, Professor of English at Saint Anselm College'By tracing the ways in which Brookner’s intellectual achievements as an art historian informed her fiction, Mayer celebrates the subversive potential of Brookner’s performative Romanticism, and offers an important reevaluation of this author’s too long underrated body of work.'Kathryn Pallant, Contemporary Women's WritingTable of ContentsIntroduction1. The Military Man, the Analysand and the Queer in A Friend from England (1987)2. The Aesthete in A Misalliance (1986)3. The Dandy in Brief Lives (1990)4. The Flâneur in Undue Influence (1999)5. The Degenerate in Falling Slowly (1998)Epilogue

Read more less

Book SynopsisLewis Grassic Gibbon galvanised the Scottish literary scene in 1932 with Sunset Song, the first novel of the epic trilogy A Scots Quair, which drew vividly upon his upbringing on a croft in Aberdeenshire to capture the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century and provide a compelling moral mandate for social and political change in the inter-war period. Yet his literary legacy of seventeen volumes produced in his short life, under his own name of James Leslie Mitchell as well as his Scots pseudonym, testify to his versatility, as historian, essayist, biographer and fiction writer. Set against an informed conspectus of the author’s life and times and incorporating substantive new source material, this study highlights his core principles, rooted in his rural upbringing: his restless humanitarianism and his veneration for the natural world. Subsequently, he is seen as a combative writer whose fame in recent years – as cultural nationalist, left-wing libertarian, proto-feminist, neo-romantic visionary and trailblazing modernist – has carried far beyond his native land. In tune with the intellectual climate of the inter-war years, Gibbon emerges as a passionate advocate of revolutionary political activism. In addition, as a profound believer in the overarching primacy of nature, he stands as a supreme practitioner in the field of ecofiction. Coupled with his modernist accomplishments with language and narrative, this firmly establishes him among the foremost fiction writers of the twentieth century – uniquely, one whose achievement has consistently won both critical and popular acclaim.Trade Review'William K. Malcolm's book is a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the life and work of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Setting Gibbon's writing within the tumultuous historical contexts of the period, Malcolm portrays a hugely talented and hard-working novelist of radical political commitment whose tragically short life culminated in the achievement of A Scots Quair, one of the great novel sequences in twentieth-century literature in English.'Dr Scott Lyall, Edinburgh Napier UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsBiographical OutlineAbbreviationsNote on the Texts1. Life and background2. Narrative preludes: The Calends of Cairo and Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights3. The real stuff of history: Hanno, Niger, The Conquest of the Maya and Nine Against the Unknown4. Autofiction: Stained Radiance and The Thirteenth Disciple5. Setting tales upon the truth: Three Go Back, The Lost Trumpet and Gay Hunter6. Haunted by horrors: Image and Superscription and Spartacus7. Distant cousin Lewis Grassic Gibbon: A Scots Quair and Scottish Scene8. LegacyNotesBibliographyFurther Reading

Read more less

Book SynopsisLewis Grassic Gibbon galvanised the Scottish literary scene in 1932 with Sunset Song, the first novel of the epic trilogy A Scots Quair, which drew vividly upon his upbringing on a croft in Aberdeenshire to capture the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century and provide a compelling moral mandate for social and political change in the inter-war period. Yet his literary legacy of seventeen volumes produced in his short life, under his own name of James Leslie Mitchell as well as his Scots pseudonym, testify to his versatility, as historian, essayist, biographer and fiction writer. Set against an informed conspectus of the author’s life and times and incorporating substantive new source material, this study highlights his core principles, rooted in his rural upbringing: his restless humanitarianism and his veneration for the natural world. Subsequently, he is seen as a combative writer whose fame in recent years – as cultural nationalist, left-wing libertarian, proto-feminist, neo-romantic visionary and trailblazing modernist – has carried far beyond his native land. In tune with the intellectual climate of the inter-war years, Gibbon emerges as a passionate advocate of revolutionary political activism. In addition, as a profound believer in the overarching primacy of nature, he stands as a supreme practitioner in the field of ecofiction. Coupled with his modernist accomplishments with language and narrative, this firmly establishes him among the foremost fiction writers of the twentieth century – uniquely, one whose achievement has consistently won both critical and popular acclaim.Trade Review'William K. Malcolm's book is a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the life and work of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Setting Gibbon's writing within the tumultuous historical contexts of the period, Malcolm portrays a hugely talented and hard-working novelist of radical political commitment whose tragically short life culminated in the achievement of A Scots Quair, one of the great novel sequences in twentieth-century literature in English.'Dr Scott Lyall, Edinburgh Napier UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsBiographical OutlineAbbreviationsNote on the Texts1. Life and background2. Narrative preludes: The Calends of Cairo and Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights3. The real stuff of history: Hanno, Niger, The Conquest of the Maya and Nine Against the Unknown4. Autofiction: Stained Radiance and The Thirteenth Disciple5. Setting tales upon the truth: Three Go Back, The Lost Trumpet and Gay Hunter6. Haunted by horrors: Image and Superscription and Spartacus7. Distant cousin Lewis Grassic Gibbon: A Scots Quair and Scottish Scene8. LegacyNotesBibliographyFurther Reading

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book explores Wordsworth’s extraordinary influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of railways, motorcars and the First World War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by both advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of transport. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage – a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period, when popular motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. This book explores how patterns of tourist behaviour and environmental awareness changed in the century of popular tourism, examining how Wordsworth’s vision and language shaped modern ideas of travel, self-reliance, landscape and environment, cultural heritage, preservation and accessibility.Trade Review‘For its rigorous research and elucidation of the impact of transport upon the evolving experience of landscape and tourism from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, Yoshikawa’s work offers both an insightful and significant contribution to current scholarship.’ Jules Gehrke, Journal of British Studies 'Yoshikawa’s archival work, as ever, is outstanding, and her claims are generally so well grounded as to seem almost obvious once the evidence is presented ... Yoshikawa’s book allowed us to take imaginative journeys while marking advancements in the thriving subdisciplines of Romantic literary geography.' Paul Westover, The Wordsworth Circle‘Saeko Yoshikawa in her new William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways, Motorcars and the Lake District, 1830–1940 includes chapters… with an abundance of fascinating information, anecdotes, and illustrations.’ Eric C. Walker, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Wordsworth and Railways2. The Railway Controversy in Wordsworth's Lake District3. The Arrival of Motorcars4. Romantic Motorists, Romantic Cyclists5. The First World War and the Lake District6. Post-War Motoring in the Lake District, 1920s-30s7. Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar PeriodEpilogue: 'Access for All'

Read more less