Literary studies: fiction Books

Book SynopsisWriters, publishers, readers and scholars have stopped apologising for the short story: the genre is no longer a bad investment, a trial-exercise for a novel or a minor entertainment, as demonstrated by exceptional writers with an almost exclusive dedication to it, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, Quim Monzó or Cristina Fernández Cubas. With deep roots in classic and medieval literatures, and great achievements in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, the genre of the short story, which benefits from the linguistic tightness of poetry and the narrative comforts of the novel, has finally been recognised as having a (hybrid) identity of its own. This volume re-edits and expands a previous bilingual collection published in 1997. The first edition included stories by twelve writers: Pilar Cibreiro, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Adelaida García Morales, Lourdes Ortiz, Laura Freixas, Marina Mayoral, Mercedes Abad, Rosa Montero, Maruja Torres, Soledad Puértolas and María Eugenia Salaverri. The present edition adds another four: Nuria Amat, Juana Salabert, Luisa Castro and Berta Marsé. The stories gathered in this second edition were written between 1980 and 2010, and testify to the richness and vitality of women’s writing in contemporary Spain. With the original texts in Spanish as well as facing-page English translations, an Introduction, notes, and bio-bibliographical information on each author, this volume is a useful tool for students of the Spanish language and culture at all levels. It includes a selection of secondary reading on Spanish women writers and a selection of anthologies of Spanish short stories since 1997.Trade Review'In conclusion, Rainy Days/Días de lluvia will enhance knowledge and understanding of important contemporary Spanish women writers, both for those familiar with Spanish literature and for those wanting to learn about them. Montserrat Lunati’s bilingual anthology is highly recommended.'Lynn K. Talbot, Bulletin of Spanish StudiesTable of Contents‘Fugitive alchemy’: some notes on the second edition of Rainy Days[introduction to the second edition]Women writers in Post-Franco Spain: Writing as a transgression?[introduction to the first edition]PILAR CIBREIRO: Días de lluvia / Rainy DaysCRISTINA FERNÁNDEZ CUBAS: El reloj de Bagdad /The Clock from BaghdadADELAIDA GARCÍA MORALES: El encuentro /A Chance EncounterLOURDES ORTIZ: Penélope / PenelopeLAURA FREIXAS: Memoria en venta / Memories for SaleMARINA MAYORAL: Nueve meses y un día / Nine Months and a DayMERCEDES ABAD: Pasión defenestrante / Uncontrolled PassionROSA MONTERO: El abuelo / The GrandfatherNURIA AMAT: Hipatia / HypatiaMARUJA TORRES: Desparecida / The Woman Who DisappearedSOLEDAD PUÉRTOLAS: Viejas historias / Tales from the PastMARÍA EUGENIA SALAVERRI: Cirugía plástica / Plastic SurgeryLUISA CASTRO: Mi madre en la ventana / My Mother at the WindowJUANA SALABERT: Serás aire volador / You’ll Become a Whisper of AirPALOMA DÍAZ-MAS: Los mayorales exhaustos / The Exhausted FarmersBERTA MARSÉ: Cocinitas / Playing HousesA selection of critical works on Spanish women’s writing since 1997 (dealing with more than one single author)A selection of anthologies of Spanish cuentos and studies on the short story genre since 1997

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Book SynopsisWriters, publishers, readers and scholars have stopped apologising for the short story: the genre is no longer a bad investment, a trial-exercise for a novel or a minor entertainment, as demonstrated by exceptional writers with an almost exclusive dedication to it, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, Quim Monzó or Cristina Fernández Cubas. With deep roots in classic and medieval literatures, and great achievements in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, the genre of the short story, which benefits from the linguistic tightness of poetry and the narrative comforts of the novel, has finally been recognised as having a (hybrid) identity of its own. This volume re-edits and expands a previous bilingual collection published in 1997. The first edition included stories by twelve writers: Pilar Cibreiro, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Adelaida García Morales, Lourdes Ortiz, Laura Freixas, Marina Mayoral, Mercedes Abad, Rosa Montero, Maruja Torres, Soledad Puértolas and María Eugenia Salaverri. The present edition adds another four: Nuria Amat, Juana Salabert, Luisa Castro and Berta Marsé. The stories gathered in this second edition were written between 1980 and 2010, and testify to the richness and vitality of women’s writing in contemporary Spain. With the original texts in Spanish as well as facing-page English translations, an Introduction, notes, and bio-bibliographical information on each author, this volume is a useful tool for students of the Spanish language and culture at all levels. It includes a selection of secondary reading on Spanish women writers and a selection of anthologies of Spanish short stories since 1997.Trade Review'In conclusion, Rainy Days/Días de lluvia will enhance knowledge and understanding of important contemporary Spanish women writers, both for those familiar with Spanish literature and for those wanting to learn about them. Montserrat Lunati’s bilingual anthology is highly recommended.'Lynn K. Talbot, Bulletin of Spanish StudiesTable of Contents‘Fugitive alchemy’: some notes on the second edition of Rainy Days[introduction to the second edition]Women writers in Post-Franco Spain: Writing as a transgression?[introduction to the first edition]PILAR CIBREIRO: Días de lluvia / Rainy DaysCRISTINA FERNÁNDEZ CUBAS: El reloj de Bagdad /The Clock from BaghdadADELAIDA GARCÍA MORALES: El encuentro /A Chance EncounterLOURDES ORTIZ: Penélope / PenelopeLAURA FREIXAS: Memoria en venta / Memories for SaleMARINA MAYORAL: Nueve meses y un día / Nine Months and a DayMERCEDES ABAD: Pasión defenestrante / Uncontrolled PassionROSA MONTERO: El abuelo / The GrandfatherNURIA AMAT: Hipatia / HypatiaMARUJA TORRES: Desparecida / The Woman Who DisappearedSOLEDAD PUÉRTOLAS: Viejas historias / Tales from the PastMARÍA EUGENIA SALAVERRI: Cirugía plástica / Plastic SurgeryLUISA CASTRO: Mi madre en la ventana / My Mother at the WindowJUANA SALABERT: Serás aire volador / You’ll Become a Whisper of AirPALOMA DÍAZ-MAS: Los mayorales exhaustos / The Exhausted FarmersBERTA MARSÉ: Cocinitas / Playing HousesA selection of critical works on Spanish women’s writing since 1997 (dealing with more than one single author)A selection of anthologies of Spanish cuentos and studies on the short story genre since 1997

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Book SynopsisOne of classical Greece's most worldly and lucid writers, Xenophon across his many works gave a restless criticism of power: democratic, oligarchic and autocratic. From military campaigns (in which he took part), through the great powers of his day (Sparta, Persia, Athens) to modes of control within the household, he observed intimately and often with partisan passion. In this work a leading French Hellenist, Vincent Azoulay, analyses across Xenophon's diverse texts the techniques by which the Greek writer recommends that leaders should manipulate. Through gifts and personal allure, though mystique, dazzling appearance, exemplary behaviour, strategic absences – and occasional terror, Xenophon analyses ways in which a powerful few might triumphantly replace the erratic democracies and selfindulgent oligarchies of his day.Table of ContentsFOREWORD INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1 – CHARIS AND ITS CHALLENGES I. The Law of Charis III. Charis in Democracy CHAPTER 2 – LEGITIMATE FAVORS I. Xenophon’s Three Graces II. Supreme Benefits: Feeding Bodies and Minds III. Contextualizing Favors: The Differential Effectiveness of Gifts CHAPTER 3 – FROM GOOD DEEDS TO MISDEEDS: THE CORRUPTING POWER OF CHARIS I. The Ambiguities of Xenia II. Agesilaus and Xenophon: The Incorruptibles? III. From Material Corruption to Spiritual Corruption CHAPTER 4 – BETWEEN CHARIS ANDMISTHOS : XENOPHON AGAINST THE MERCHANTS? I. ‘The Hostile World’ of Goods II. The Ambiguous Virtues of Commercial Exchange CHAPTER 5 – CHARIS AND ENVY I. The Omnipresence of Phthonos: The Social Genesis of a Feeling II. Leveling From the Bottom or Redistributing from the Top? III. Phthonos and Charis: Dangerous Liaisons CHAPTER 6 – CHARIS AND PHILIA: THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP I. The Debate over Philia II. Philia and Patronage III. From Philia to Philanthropia CHAPTER 7 – CHARIS AND PATERNITY I. From Fraternal Union to Paternal Love II. Paternal Power: An Unattainable Dream? III. Cyrus, or the Universal Father CHAPTER 8 – THE GRACES OF LOVE I. Erotic Reciprocity and Its Dangers II. The Political Power of the Eromenos III. From Socrates to Cyrus: The Rivalry of Two Graces IV. Epilogue: On the Love of Men and the Veneration of the Gods CONCLUSION PHILOLOGICAL ANNEX: CHARIS IN XENOPHON’S CORPUS Contents NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY GENERAL INDEX INDEX LOCORUM

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Book SynopsisJane Austen is one of the most extensively read writers in English literature, renowned around the world for her much-loved romantic novels. Little is often known about this brilliant author, yet in this absorbing collection of stories and trivia readers will find answers to the amazing and extraordinary aspects of Austen’s life, work and legacy. From her development as a world-class author from unassuming origins and the secrets of her own life and loves, through insights into her novels and their characters along with the changing reception to them over the years, to intriguing stories behind the screen and stage adaptations of her works and her continued legacy, there is something for every enthusiast to relish. This authoritative and absorbing book is published to coincide with the 200th Anniversary of Austen’s death in 2017.Table of Contents1 Class act 10 2 'Bad reckoners' 12 3 112-year association 13 4 Happy home 15 5 Three grand houses 17 6 Second Farmer George 18 7 The Loiterer 20 8 Chosen as heir 22 9 Juvenile parody 25 10 Jane and Cassandra 27 11 Good friends 29 12 Leading lady 31 13 Death in the Caribbean 34 14 The Tom Lefroy affair 36 15 Novel beginnings 37 16 Wishful thinking? 39 17 Gold chains and topaz crosses 41 18 Strange scandal 43 19 'It's all settled!' 44 20 Affairs of the heart 47 21 Lure of Lyme 48 22 Sudden death 50 23 To the rescue 51 23 Opulent magnificence 53 24 Seaside interlude 55 25 Centre of creativity 57 26 Solitary sketch 59 27 First publication 59 28 'My own darling child' 63 29 Authorship revealed 65 30 Comic spirit 66 31 Universal truths 68 32 Mixed reactions 70 33 Delightful pilgrimage 72 34 'A rogue... but a civil one' 73 35 Scott's adulatory review 75 36 By royal permission 77 37 The duties of aunts 79 38 Cinderella revisited 82 39 In her sister's arms 84 40 Gothic parody 86 41 Literary genius ignored 88 42 Novel fragment 90 43 Early critics 91 44 'Highest esteem' 93 45 Facts of life 95 46 'Swell show' 96 47 Editor's hand 98 48 Cult status 100 49 White gowns and bonnets 101 50 Desert Island books 103 51 Darcymania 106 52 Zombie mash-up 107 53 Gripping continuation 108 54 Sparking a Twitterstorm 110 55 Social implications 112 56 Manly men 114 57 Spotlight on Cincinnati 116 58 Literary legacy 118 59 Screen legacy 120

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Book SynopsisShimon Adaf and Lavie Tidhar are two of Israel's most subversive and politically outspoken writers. Growing up on opposite sides of the Israeli spectrum - Tidhar in the north of Israel in the Zionist, socialist Kibbutz; Adaf from a family of religious Mizrahi Jews living in Sderot - the two nevertheless shared a love of books, and were especially drawn to the strange visions and outrageous sensibilities of the science fiction that was available in Hebrew. Here, they engage in a dialogue that covers their approach to writing the fantastic, as they question how to write about Israel and Palestine, about Judaism, about the Holocaust, about childhoods and their end. Extending the conversation even into their fiction, the book contains two brand new short stories - "Tutim" by Tidhar, and "third attribute" by Adaf - in which each appears as a character in the other's tale; simultaneously political and fantastical, they burn with an angry, despairing intensity.

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Book SynopsisThe story of Uwe Johnson, one of Germany's greatest and most-influential post-war writers, and how he came to live and work in Sheerness, Kent in the 1970s. In 1974, a strange man called "Charles" arrived in the small town of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. He could often be found sitting at the bar in the Napier Tavern, drinking beer and smoking Gaulloises while flicking through the Kent Evening Post. But who was this unlikely newcomer? This "Charles" was in actual fact Uwe Johnson, one of the greatest and most-influential East-German writers of the post-war period. But what quirk of Cold War history had caused him to end up in Sheerness, when his contemporaries had instead fled the DDR to Rome, New York or West Berlin? Drawn from Johnson's letters to his friends Max Frisch, Hannah Arendt, Christa Wolf, and others, as well as contemporary accounts and archival materials, this intriguing mix of literary and cultural history and memoir uncovers the last ten years of Johnson's life as it was in Sheerness, set against the backdrop of the social and cultural upheaval of the late 1970s.Trade Review"A monumental sifting and arranging of local particulars, stitched against the savage farce of a great European novelist’s elective exile... Patrick Wright has picked over the landfill of a very specific Estuary culture to devastating effect.""A double 'biography' of the great but always tempestuous German writer Uwe Johnson and his ultimate home, the gritty and disreputable Isle of Sheppey. 'Biography' is in quotes because Wright is a saboteur of genres and his books encompass multiple worlds. I stand in awe of what he has accomplished here.""A masterful modernist history, and Patrick Wright’s most important book, bringing Europe to England by showing it has always been here, at a moment when too many want to believe something else.""An extraordinary, haunting book... a phenomenal achievement.""An astonishing chronicle of the great German author Uwe Johnson, who moved to Sheerness, Kent, in the 70s.”“To repeat: this tidal book, reaching into everything and then withdrawing to show what is left behind, is a triumph.""A model portrait of person and place, a kind of cultural and literary geography that never fails to fascinate."“A huge achievement: a comprehensive portrait of a place and a person, and the best book about Brexit that’s yet been written."“Wright is not a biographer or a journalist but a sort of spirit-ethnographer, patient and attentive to change and complexity.”"A glorious rabbit hole of a book ... a longue durée portrait, from the 17th century to Thatcher, of a single location on the edges of British national life."“Wright plays both the anatomist and the elegist for the blighted modernity of seemingly forsaken spots such as Sheppey … a fragmentary panorama of traumatic, half-remembered history, personal and national.”“Thorough, discerning, compassionate.”"The most involving and originally-conceived social history of modern England to have appeared in decades." "A hymn to estuarial peculiarity and a lament for an awkward man determined never to find his place." "I was entirely captivated by this microscopic, discursive study of Uwe Johnson... a great book about the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe, and not a page too long."

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Book Synopsis“Wang Meng is the only Chinese writer who really understands China,” according to noted sinologist Merle Goldman, as well as being the writer that many at home and abroad have considered as deserving of a Nobel Prize if any Chinese writer ever did. His memoir is a colorful record of life in an eventful era when one could get up in the morning a CCP official and go to bed an “enemy” of the people.Wang Meng knew the hardships of life from an early age. A brilliant student since childhood, Wang gave up the chance of college to join the Communist underground. Ultimately installed as a regular Communist Party cadre in charge of a district Party Youth League and bored with petty bureaucracy, Wang published a short story which rhapsodized the soul-searching of an earnest young “newcomer” on the scene—an instant bestseller. In spite of Chairman Mao's favorable comments on the story, Wang Meng became a “rightist”—i.e., categorized as the enemy.Banished to distant Xinjiang, Wang Meng mastered the Uighur language, learned farming skills, and was embraced by the Uighurs as one of their own. The attack on his short story “Hard Porridge,” a masterpiece of irony (first English translation published in the Paris Review), only served to highlight his genius and started off a serio-comic string of writings on “porridge” from every conceivable angle by a host Chinese writers, becoming the memorable event of the year.Wang Meng did not change his spots when he became Minister of Culture and a member of the Chinese People’s Consutative Conference. While making contributions to cultural exchanges on the international scene, Wang Meng kept his identity as first and foremost a writer.

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Book SynopsisHaving been marginalized from the literature-proper sphere of Confucian elite culture, the novel began to transform significantly at turn of the twentieth century in Korea. Selected novels in transformation that Jooyeon Rhee investigates in this book include both translated and creative historical novels, domestic novels, and crime novels, all of which were produced under the spell of civilization and enlightenment. Rhee places the transformation of the novel in the complex nexus of civilization discourses, transnational literary forces, and modern print media to show how they became a driving force behind the development of modern Korean literature. Gender is an analytical category central to this book since it became an important epistemological ground on which to define the Korean nation and modernity in literature at the time, and because the novel was one of the most effective technologies that mediated and populated knowledge about gender roles and relations. The masculine norms and principles articulated in novels, Rhee argues, are indicative of writers' and translators' negotiation with political and cultural forces of the time; their observations of the ambiguity of modernity manifest in the figure of mobile, motivated, and forward-looking woman and immobile, emotional, and suppressed men.

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Book SynopsisFor generations, the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder have defined the American frontier and the pioneer experience for the public at large. Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts presents three typescripts of Wilder's original Pioneer Girl manuscript in an examination of the process through which she and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, transformed her autobiography into the much-loved Little House series. As the women polished the narrative from draft to draft, a picture emerges of the working relationship between the women, of the lives they lived, and of the literary works they created.Editor Nancy Tystad Koupal and other editors of the Pioneer Girl Project provide a meticulous study of the Wilder/Lane partnership as Wilder's autobiography undergoes revision, and the women redevelop and expand portions of it into Wilder's successful children's and young adult novels and into Lane's bestselling adult novels in the 1930s. The three revised texts of Pioneer Girl, set side by side, showcase the intertwined processes of writing and editing and the contributions of writer and editor. In background essays and annotations, Koupal and her team of editors provide historical context and explore the ways in which Wilder or Lane changed and reused the material.Wilder and Lane's partnership has been the subject of longstanding speculation, but Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts is the first work to explore the women's relationship by examining the evolution of surviving manuscripts. Showcasing differences in the texts and offering numerous additional documents and handwritten emendations, the editors create a rich resource for scholars to use in assessing the editorial and writing principles, choices, and reasoning that Lane employed to shape the manuscripts for publication. Readers can follow along as Wilder grows into a novelist that "no depression could stop."The New York Times best seller, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (2014), edited by Pamela Smith Hill, gave the general reader easy access to Wilder's original account for the first time, but that book only scratched the surface of available textual and archival materials. Ultimately, the editors of Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts employ the rich resource of letters between Wilder and her publisher and between Wilder and Lane, along with rough drafts and false starts of the Little House books, to inform scholars and readers about the original manuscript's metamorphosis into novels and about the intriguing editorial relationship between Wilder and Lane. Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts deepens our understanding of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the process through which she would ultimately become an icon of young adult literature.Trade ReviewPioneer Girl: The Revised Texts makes fresh observations that are sure to jump-start new debate and discussions centered on the writer-editor relationship between Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. The annotations provide great documentary background and reveal the behind the scenes work that led to the now classic Little House series.""- William A. AndersonTable of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction "Through my own typewriter": The Revised Texts of Pioneer Girl Editorial Procedures Pioneer Girl Kansas and Missouri, 1869-1871 Wisconsin, 1871-1874 Minnesota 1874-1876 Iowa, 1876–1877 Minnesota, 1877-1879 Dakota Territory, 1879-1880 Dakota Territory, the Hard Winter, 1880–1881 Dakota Territory, 1880-1885 Dakota Territory, 1883-1885 Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA new critical edition of Sutton Griggs’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century novel, which continues to shed light on understandings of Black politics. Sutton E. Griggs’s first novel, originally published in 1899, paints a searing picture of the violent enforcement of disfranchisement and Jim Crow racial segregation. Based on events of the time, including US imperial policies, revolutionary movements, and racial protests, Imperium in Imperio introduces the fictional Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave as “future leaders of their race” and uses these characters to make sense of the violence that marked the dawn of the twentieth century. Taking on contemporary battles over separatism and integration, Griggs’s novel continues to play a crucial role in understandings of Black politics.Edited and introduced by Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W. Warren, this new critical edition offers not only an incisive biographical and historical introduction to the novel and its author but also a wealth of references that make the events and characters of Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio, and its aftermath, accessible to readers today.Trade Review“An excellent edition that will make this important work more accessible to scholars and students alike.”- Benjamin Fagan, author of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen NationTable of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chronology: Life and Times of Sutton E. Griggs Textual Note Imperium in Imperio Annotations Emendations Appendix A: The Lynching of Postmaster Frazier B. Baker Appendix B: The Story of My Struggles (1914) by Sutton E. Griggs Appendix C: Griggs and the Richmond Planet Appendix D: Signed First Edition Appendix E: The Virginian Pilot Appendix F: Promotional Materials and Contemporary Review of Imperium in Imperio Appendix G: Speeches

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Book SynopsisIn The Latinx Files, Matthew David Goodwin traces how Latinx science fiction writers are reclaiming the space alien from its xenophobic legacy in the science fiction genre. The book argues that the space alien is a vital Latinx figure preserving Latinx cultures by activating the myriad possible constructions of the space alien to represent race and migration in the popular imagination. The works discussed in this book, including those of H.G. Wells, Gloria Anzaldúa, Junot Diaz, André M. Carrington, and many others, often explicitly reject the derogatory correlation of the space alien and Latinxs, while at other times, they contain space aliens that function as a source of either enlightenment or horror for Latinx communities. Throughout this nuanced analysis, The Latinx Files demonstrates how the character of the space alien has been significant to Latinx communities and has great potential for future writers and artists. Trade Review“Goodwin has written a much needed, sophisticated, and serious analysis of Latinx people and culture in science fiction. Through his sweeping analysis of contemporary Latinx science fiction he demonstrates that Latinx science fiction writers have often used the space invader to represent race and migration.” — John Bratzel, author of The Shadow War: German Espionage and United States Counterespionage in Latin America "There is power in being an alien (from the Latin alienus, meaning stranger): you're always in transit, arriving from somewhere else. Although we Latinos are frequently portrayed as a menace, giving the Anglos the goosebumps, the tides are changing now. In spite of all the anger, it is clear that our planet is a happier, less obfuscating place than the one made by the shrieking Anglos. Jump into this space shuttle made by Commander Matthew Goodwin and explore the universe of chupacabras and other charming monsters. You will discover not only that there is indeed intelligent life in outer space but that it is far more diverse than you ever imagined." — Ilan Stavans, general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature "This is a long overdue work in the fields of Latinx cultural studies and science fiction studies, bringing both together in a fascinating, in-depth study of the iconic figure of the space alien. Without separating Latinx science fiction into a marginalized enclave, Goodwin's work shows how Latinx writers and artists have long been shaping and responding to science fiction and how science fiction has long been a significant source of inspiration in the Latinx cultural imaginary. This book is sure to be discussed for years to come." — Lysa M. Rivera, associate professor of English at Western Washington UniversityTable of ContentsForeword: Why the Space of the Latinx Speculative Matters by Frederick Luis Aldama Preface: The X in the Latinx Files Introduction: A Brief Survey of Latinx Science Fiction 1 On Space Aliens 2 Gloria Anzaldúa and the Making of an Alien Consciousness 3 Reclaiming the Space Alien 4 Aliens in a Strange Land 5 The Unbearable Enlightenment of the Space Alien 6 Space Aliens and the Discovery of Horror 7 La conciencia Chupacabras Conclusion: Fight the Future Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisEvidence of Things Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions is an interdisciplinary study of blackness in genre literature of the Americas. The “fantastical” in fantastical blackness is conceived by an unrestrained imagination because it lives, despite every attempt at annihilation. This blackness amazes because it refuses the limits of anti-blackness. As put to work in this project, fantastical blackness is an ethical praxis that centers black self-knowledge as a point of departure rather than as a reaction to threatening or diminishing dominant narratives. Mystery, romance, fantasy, mixed-genre, and science fictions’ unrestrained imaginings profoundly communicate this quality of blackness, specifically here through the work of Barbara Neely, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Colin Channer. When black writers center this expressive quality, they make fantastical blackness available to a broad audience that then uses its imaginable vocabularies to reshape extra-literary realities. Ultimately, popular genres’ imaginable possibilities offer strategies through which the made up can be made real. Trade Review"With the brilliance of James Baldwin's cultural criticism as a conceptual frame, Frederick's 'fantastical blackness' defies the limitations offered by colonial attempts at diminishing African subjectivities. Instead, Frederick shows us how Black writers of fantastical blackness explore the contours of African identities made possible without the dehumanization of the colonial project. This contribution to scholarship on Black speculative fiction is a tour de force, for sure." -- Meredith Gadsby * author of Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival *"Evidence of Things Not Seen is a thoughtful and welcome examination of contemporary Black fantastic literature that expands our understanding of the liberatory ways that Black authors creatively imagine and write against the ongoing perniciousness of global anti-blackness." -- Michelle D. Commander * author of Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic *"With the brilliance of James Baldwin's cultural criticism as a conceptual frame, Frederick's 'fantastical blackness' defies the limitations offered by colonial attempts at diminishing African subjectivities. Instead, Frederick shows us how Black writers of fantastical blackness explore the contours of African identities made possible without the dehumanization of the colonial project. This contribution to scholarship on Black speculative fiction is a tour de force, for sure." -- Meredith Gadsby * author of Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival *"Evidence of Things Not Seen is a thoughtful and welcome examination of contemporary Black fantastic literature that expands our understanding of the liberatory ways that Black authors creatively imagine and write against the ongoing perniciousness of global anti-blackness." -- Michelle D. Commander * author of Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic *Table of ContentsPrologue Introduction 1 First—Mystery: Fantastically Black Blanche White: BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam 2 Second—Urban Romantica: Making Black and Jamaican Love: Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain and Romance-ified Diaspora Identities 3 Third—Fantasy: Fantastic Possibilities: Theorizing National Belonging through Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring 4 Fourth—Multigenre: Seeing White: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad 5 Fifth—Fantasy, Short Story: Fantastically Black Woman: Nalo Hopkinson’s “A Habit of Waste” Epilogue AcknowledgmentsNotes Index

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Book SynopsisSome comics fans view the industry’s Golden Age (1930s-1950s) as a challenging time when it comes to representations of race, an era when the few Black characters appeared as brutal savages, devious witch doctors, or unintelligible minstrels. Yet the true portrait is more complex and reveals that even as caricatures predominated, some Golden Age comics creators offered more progressive and nuanced depictions of Black people. Desegregating Comics assembles a team of leading scholars to explore how debates about the representation of Blackness shaped both the production and reception of Golden Age comics. Some essays showcase rare titles like Negro Romance and consider the formal innovations introduced by Black comics creators like Matt Baker and Alvin Hollingsworth, while others examine the treatment of race in the work of such canonical cartoonists as George Herriman and Will Eisner. The collection also investigates how Black fans read and loved comics, but implored publishers to stop including hurtful stereotypes. As this book shows, Golden Age comics artists, writers, editors, distributors, and readers engaged in heated negotiations over how Blackness should be portrayed, and the outcomes of those debates continue to shape popular culture today.Trade Review“Only someone living in a cave wouldn't see how thoroughly comics permeate American culture. But even those knowledgeable about graphic arts may not be aware of how comics mirror this nation's often tortured racial history. And even fewer people know about the pioneering Black artists who worked to challenge and change racist stereotypes. What that means is that the groundbreaking essays in Desegregating Comics are essential contributions to an exciting, relatively new field of long-overdue scholarship.” -- Charles Johnson * National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage *"Desegregating Comics is essential reading for those seeking a more complex and revisionist history of the Black image in comics in the first half of the twentieth century. It includes leading voices in media, literature, gender, and Black studies who unearth the collaborative efforts in the industry to reshape visual and narrative renderings of spectacular blackness and speculations of blackness." -- Deborah Elizabeth Whaley * author of Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime *Table of ContentsIntroduction: “An Apt Cartoon” QIANA WHITTED Part I Iconographies of Race and Racism 1 Rose O’Neill and Visual Tropes of Blackness IAN GORDON 2 The Passing Fancies of Krazy Kat NICHOLAS SAMMOND 3 “How Else Could I Have Created a Black Boy in That Era?”: Racial Caricature and Will Eisner’s Legacy 61 ANDREW J. KUNKA Part II Formal Innovation and Aesthetic Range 4 Desegregating Black Art Genealogies: An Invitation REBECCA WANZO 5 Misdirections in Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady CHRIS GAVALER AND MONALESIA EARLE 6 The Art of Alvin Hollingsworth BLAIR DAVIS 7 “Hello Public!”: Jackie Ormes in the Print Culture of the Pittsburgh Courier ELI BOONIN-VAIL Part III Comics Readership and Respectability Politics 8 “Never Any Dirty Ones”: Comics Readership among African American Youth in the Mid-Twentieth Century CAROL L. TILLEY 9 All-Negro Comics and Counterhistories of Race in the Golden Age QIANA WHITTED 10 “This Business of White and Black”: Captain Marvel’s Steamboat, the Youthbuilders, and Fawcett’s Roy Campanella, Baseball Hero BRIAN CREMINS 11 Al Hollingsworth’s Kandy: Race, Colorism, and Romance in African American Newspaper Comics MORA J. BEAUCHAMP-BYRD Part IV Disrupting Genre, Character, and Convention 12 Diabolical Master of Black Magic: Examining Agency through Villainy in “The Voodoo Man” PHILLIP LAMARR CUNNINGHAM 13 Love in Color: Fawcett’s Revolutionary Negro Romance JACQUE NODELL 14 An Afrofuturist Legacy: Neil Knight and Black Speculative Capital JULIAN C. CHAMBLISS 15 “For They Were There!”: Dell Comics’ Lobo and the Black Cowboy in American Comic Books MIKE LEMON Acknowledgments Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisImpossibly muscular men and voluptuous women parade around in revealing, skintight outfits, and their romantic and sexual entanglements are a key part of the ongoing drama. Such is the state of superhero comics and movies, a genre that has become one of our leading mythologies, conveying influential messages about gender, sexuality, and relationships.Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence. With examples spanning from the Golden Ages of DC and Marvel comics up to recent works like the TV series The Boys, this study provides a comprehensive look at how superhero media shapes our perceptions of love, sex, and gender.Trade Review“It’s a bird, plane. . . No, it’s actually a phallic-bulged Man of Steel, ultrasonic orgasming Black Canary, jester in hot-pants Harley, vanilla romancing Spidey, a gay lip-locking Iceman, queer Batcave encounters, and out-and-proud Young Avengers. With his usual superhuman infrared analytic prowess, Jeffrey Allan Brown makes visible to the human eye a superhero universe that at once feeds straight fanboy wish fulfillment fantasies of square-jawed virility and radically troubles mainstreamed norms of love, sex, sexuality, and gender!” -- Frederick Luis Aldama * author of Eisner Award-winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics *"From porn parodies to Bat man-caves, from hidden Hulk phalluses to robots in revealing negligees, Jeffrey A. Brown demonstrates convincingly that superhero narratives are filled not just with superfeats, but with supergender." -- Noah Berlatsky * author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics *"We know that superhero comics are concerned with masculinity, but Jeffrey Brown makes a powerful case for understanding superhero comics as also foundationally about love and sex. Perhaps this accessible text with its impressive breadth will finally put to bed the idea that these works are only selling adolescent fantasies about manhood. Creators and fans consistently use superhero comics to explore very adult ideas about intimacy. Adding one more important volume to his prolific body of work, Brown yet again demonstrates that he is a skilled reader of gender in popular culture." -- Rebecca Wanzo * author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging *"Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence." * Forces of Geek *"Smash Pages Q&A: Jeffrey A. Brown: The pop culture scholar discusses his latest books on superheroes, diversity and gender" * SmashPages *“It’s a bird, plane. . . No, it’s actually a phallic-bulged Man of Steel, ultrasonic orgasming Black Canary, jester in hot-pants Harley, vanilla romancing Spidey, a gay lip-locking Iceman, queer Batcave encounters, and out-and-proud Young Avengers. With his usual superhuman infrared analytic prowess, Jeffrey Allan Brown makes visible to the human eye a superhero universe that at once feeds straight fanboy wish fulfillment fantasies of square-jawed virility and radically troubles mainstreamed norms of love, sex, sexuality, and gender!” -- Frederick Luis Aldama * author of Eisner Award-winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics *"From porn parodies to Bat man-caves, from hidden Hulk phalluses to robots in revealing negligees, Jeffrey A. Brown demonstrates convincingly that superhero narratives are filled not just with superfeats, but with supergender." -- Noah Berlatsky * author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics *"We know that superhero comics are concerned with masculinity, but Jeffrey Brown makes a powerful case for understanding superhero comics as also foundationally about love and sex. Perhaps this accessible text with its impressive breadth will finally put to bed the idea that these works are only selling adolescent fantasies about manhood. Creators and fans consistently use superhero comics to explore very adult ideas about intimacy. Adding one more important volume to his prolific body of work, Brown yet again demonstrates that he is a skilled reader of gender in popular culture." -- Rebecca Wanzo * author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging *"Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence." * Forces of Geek *"Smash Pages QA: Jeffrey A. Brown: The pop culture scholar discusses his latest books on superheroes, diversity and gender" * SmashPages *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Signifying Love, Sex, and Gender 1 The Visible and the Invisible: Superheroes and Phallic Masculinity 2 Women Dark and Dangerous: Super Femme Fatales and Female Sexuality 3 Secrets of the Batcave: Masculinity and Homosocial Space 4 Marriage, Domesticity, and Superheroes (for Better or Worse) 5 It Starts with a Kiss: Straightening and Queering the Superhero 6 Even an Android Has Feelings: Learning about Love and Robots 7 Super Fluidity: Transing and Transcending Gendered Bodies 8 KRAKK! WHACK! SMACK! Comic Book Violence and Sexual Assault 9 Pleasure, Pain, Climaxes, and Little Deaths Conclusion: Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes in Real Life References Index

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Book SynopsisImpossibly muscular men and voluptuous women parade around in revealing, skintight outfits, and their romantic and sexual entanglements are a key part of the ongoing drama. Such is the state of superhero comics and movies, a genre that has become one of our leading mythologies, conveying influential messages about gender, sexuality, and relationships.Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence. With examples spanning from the Golden Ages of DC and Marvel comics up to recent works like the TV series The Boys, this study provides a comprehensive look at how superhero media shapes our perceptions of love, sex, and gender.Trade Review“It’s a bird, plane. . . No, it’s actually a phallic-bulged Man of Steel, ultrasonic orgasming Black Canary, jester in hot-pants Harley, vanilla romancing Spidey, a gay lip-locking Iceman, queer Batcave encounters, and out-and-proud Young Avengers. With his usual superhuman infrared analytic prowess, Jeffrey Allan Brown makes visible to the human eye a superhero universe that at once feeds straight fanboy wish fulfillment fantasies of square-jawed virility and radically troubles mainstreamed norms of love, sex, sexuality, and gender!” -- Frederick Luis Aldama * author of Eisner Award-winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics *"From porn parodies to Bat man-caves, from hidden Hulk phalluses to robots in revealing negligees, Jeffrey A. Brown demonstrates convincingly that superhero narratives are filled not just with superfeats, but with supergender." -- Noah Berlatsky * author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics *"We know that superhero comics are concerned with masculinity, but Jeffrey Brown makes a powerful case for understanding superhero comics as also foundationally about love and sex. Perhaps this accessible text with its impressive breadth will finally put to bed the idea that these works are only selling adolescent fantasies about manhood. Creators and fans consistently use superhero comics to explore very adult ideas about intimacy. Adding one more important volume to his prolific body of work, Brown yet again demonstrates that he is a skilled reader of gender in popular culture." -- Rebecca Wanzo * author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging *"Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence." * Forces of Geek *"Smash Pages Q&A: Jeffrey A. Brown: The pop culture scholar discusses his latest books on superheroes, diversity and gender" * SmashPages *“It’s a bird, plane. . . No, it’s actually a phallic-bulged Man of Steel, ultrasonic orgasming Black Canary, jester in hot-pants Harley, vanilla romancing Spidey, a gay lip-locking Iceman, queer Batcave encounters, and out-and-proud Young Avengers. With his usual superhuman infrared analytic prowess, Jeffrey Allan Brown makes visible to the human eye a superhero universe that at once feeds straight fanboy wish fulfillment fantasies of square-jawed virility and radically troubles mainstreamed norms of love, sex, sexuality, and gender!” -- Frederick Luis Aldama * author of Eisner Award-winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics *"From porn parodies to Bat man-caves, from hidden Hulk phalluses to robots in revealing negligees, Jeffrey A. Brown demonstrates convincingly that superhero narratives are filled not just with superfeats, but with supergender." -- Noah Berlatsky * author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics *"We know that superhero comics are concerned with masculinity, but Jeffrey Brown makes a powerful case for understanding superhero comics as also foundationally about love and sex. Perhaps this accessible text with its impressive breadth will finally put to bed the idea that these works are only selling adolescent fantasies about manhood. Creators and fans consistently use superhero comics to explore very adult ideas about intimacy. Adding one more important volume to his prolific body of work, Brown yet again demonstrates that he is a skilled reader of gender in popular culture." -- Rebecca Wanzo * author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging *"Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence." * Forces of Geek *"Smash Pages QA: Jeffrey A. Brown: The pop culture scholar discusses his latest books on superheroes, diversity and gender" * SmashPages *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Signifying Love, Sex, and Gender 1 The Visible and the Invisible: Superheroes and Phallic Masculinity 2 Women Dark and Dangerous: Super Femme Fatales and Female Sexuality 3 Secrets of the Batcave: Masculinity and Homosocial Space 4 Marriage, Domesticity, and Superheroes (for Better or Worse) 5 It Starts with a Kiss: Straightening and Queering the Superhero 6 Even an Android Has Feelings: Learning about Love and Robots 7 Super Fluidity: Transing and Transcending Gendered Bodies 8 KRAKK! WHACK! SMACK! Comic Book Violence and Sexual Assault 9 Pleasure, Pain, Climaxes, and Little Deaths Conclusion: Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes in Real Life References Index

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Book SynopsisAnalyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of “reproduction” in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers.Trade Review“Perfect Copies is about the creation and impact of comics that skirt the line of what readers might imagine would be considered typical within the medium. This book pushes readers to think about the ways that comics creators nudge the boundaries of how comics might look, "read" and visually "feel.” It is a must read for everyone who loves the ways that comics have revolutionized art and aesthetics and that art has revolutionized comics and notions of reproduction.”— Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, Dean of Liberal Arts, UNC School of The ArtsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 The People Upstairs: Space, Memory, and the Queered Family in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 2 Reach Out and Touch Someone: The Haptic Dreams of Gareth Brookes 3 Phantom Threads: Seeing in the Dark and Conor Stechschulte 4 If You See Something Say Something: Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina 5 There is a Monster in My Closet: Brecht Evens’s Panther Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisGiven the current moment—polarized populations, increasing climate fears, and decline of supranational institutions in favor of a rising tide of nationalisms—it is easy to understand the proliferation of apocalyptic and dystopian elements in popular culture. Infected Empires examines one of the most popular figures in contemporary apocalyptic film: the zombie. This harbinger of apocalypse reveals bloody truths about the human condition, the wounds of history, and methods of contending with them. Infected Empires considers parallels in the zombie genre to historical and current events on different political, theological and philosophical levels, and proposes that the zombie can be read as a figure of decolonization and an allegory of resistance to oppressive structures that racialize, marginalize, disable, and dispose of bodies. Studying films from around the world, including Latin America, Asia, Africa, the US, and Europe, Infected Empires presents a vision of a global zombie that points toward a posthuman and feminist future. Trade Review"A brilliant cartography of the zombie film, elegantly crafted, theoretically informed and ambitious in its transnational sweep and decolonial focus."— Cynthia Steele, author of Politics, Gender, and the Mexican Novel, 1968-1988 "A fascinating and rigorous study that invites us to analyze our dreams and fears, the contemporary effects of global power and coloniality, necropolitics, today’s structures of oppression, and certainly the very essence of our own humanity. Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini have written a book on zombies that will stand the test of time; their reading decolonizes and queers identity, the present, the future, horror fiction, and most definitely: our understanding of history."— Oswaldo Estrada, author of Troubled Memories: Iconic Mexican Women and the Traps of Representation The Page 99 Test: ?Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini's "Infected Empires"— The Page 99 Test "A fascinating and rigorous study that invites us to analyze our dreams and fears, the contemporary effects of global power and coloniality, necropolitics, today’s structures of oppression, and certainly the very essence of our own humanity. Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini have written a book on zombies that will stand the test of time; their reading decolonizes and queers identity, the present, the future, horror fiction, and most definitely: our understanding of history."— Oswaldo Estrada, author of Troubled Memories: Iconic Mexican Women and the Traps of Representation The Page 99 Test: Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini's "Infected Empires"— The Page 99 Test "A brilliant cartography of the zombie film, elegantly crafted, theoretically informed and ambitious in its transnational sweep and decolonial focus."— Cynthia Steele, author of Politics, Gender, and the Mexican Novel, 1968-1988Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: What is a Zombie? Chapter 2: Mutilate the State! Nation Race, Power Chapter 3: Devouring Capitalism Chapter 4: Bodies that Splatter. Queering and Cripping Zombies Chapter 5: Of Matter, Dust, and Earth: Zombies and the Environment Conclusions

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Book Synopsis2022 Eisner Award Winner for Best Academic/Scholarly Work Japanese comics, commonly known as manga, are a global sensation. Critics, scholars, and everyday readers have often viewed this artform through an Orientalist framework, treating manga as the exotic antithesis to American and European comics. In reality, the history of manga is deeply intertwined with Japan’s avid importation of Western technology and popular culture in the early twentieth century. Comics and the Origins of Manga reveals how popular U.S. comics characters like Jiggs and Maggie, the Katzenjammer Kids, Felix the Cat, and Popeye achieved immense fame in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Modern comics had earlier developed in the United States in response to new technologies like motion pictures and sound recording, which revolutionized visual storytelling by prompting the invention of devices like speed lines and speech balloons. As audiovisual entertainment like movies and record players spread through Japan, comics followed suit. Their immediate popularity quickly encouraged Japanese editors and cartoonists to enthusiastically embrace the foreign medium and make it their own, paving the way for manga as we know it today. By challenging the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from centuries of prior Japanese art and explaining why manga and other comics around the world share the same origin story, Comics and the Origins of Manga offers a new understanding of this increasingly influential artform.Trade Review“I have been waiting many years to see something like Eike Exner’s Comics and the Origins of Manga. Modern Japanese comics, or 'manga,' have enjoyed huge success around the world in the last three decades. So much so that today some fans occasionally seem to think manga—perhaps even all comics—are really a purely Japanese invention. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In his book, using primary sources from inside and outside Japan, Eike Exner does a wonderful job of cutting through both mist and myths and showing us another reality." -- Frederik L. Schodt * author of Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga *"Comics and the Origins of Manga is a fascinating, materialist account of the history shared between the Japanese and Euro-American comics traditions. With the rise of manga as a globally dominant idiom, the prewar development of the form has been of increasing interest to artists and researchers alike. Eike Exner’s thorough, elucidating scholarship tracks this history in an engaging manner in what will undoubtedly be an important English-language reference work on the subject for years to come. Highly recommended." -- Adam Buttrick * cartoonist *“Eike Exner has meticulously researched voluminous archival materials transnationally, analyzed them critically and carefully, and, in the process, challenged, contradicted, and corrected the history of manga’s origins. Without any reservation, a history-altering masterpiece!” -- John A. Lent * founder/publisher/editor-in-chief, International Journal of Comic Art *"Through subtle formal analysis and groundbreaking archival research, Comics and the Origins of Manga makes a compelling argument for the strong influence of translated American comics on the development of modern Japanese manga.” -- Henry Jenkins * author of Comics and Stuff *“...a compelling investigation of an historical 'audio-visual' dialogue between the 'sound images' of comics and manga...this text becomes a meaningful revelation of the unique and multifarious histories of world print and comic cultures.” -- Frenchy Lunning * editor of Mechademia *"This is an excellent book that I enjoyed reading immensely. The topic is timely and important and the scholarship is meticulous and comprehensive." -- Gennifer Weisenfeld * author of Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 *New Books Network: New Books in Japanese Studies interview with Eike Exner * New Books Network: New Books in Japanese Studies *"Its innovative perspective lies above all in the precision of the documentation and the scrupulous study of the phenomena of translation and borrowing as well as in the history of the narrative and auditory device of the comic strip. For all these reasons, it is a book that stands out for its effects of transmission of both knowledge and sound effects!" * Neuvieme Art *"Terrific book by Eike Exner - Comics and the Origins of Manga. A brisk-reading but deeply-researched study of the impact American comic strips had on the development of manga in the early decades of the 20th century. New from Rutgers University Press. 'I recommend it.' -me" -- Joe McCulloch * The Comics Journal editor *"Really enjoyed this book. Fascinating examination of how early American comic strips influenced the develop of manga than is generally acknowledged. Highly recommended." -- Chris Mautner * The Comics Journal writer *"'Comics and The Origins of Manga charts the vital influence of US comic strips in Japan (as early as 1908) and to manga creators' incorporating balloons, sound effects and other audiovisual elements inside their panels." -- Derf Backderf * author of Kent State *"Exner’s work is stunningly rigorous and detailed, surfacing a wealth of examples and specific moments of exchange." -- Shawn Gilmore * Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments A Note on Images Foreword Introduction Prologue: The Historical Origins and Changing Meaning of “Manga” up to 1923 Chapter One: “Popular in Society at Large:” the First Talking Manga Chapter Two: “Listen Vunce!” The Audiovisual Revolution in Graphic Narrative Chapter Three: When Krazy Kat Spoke Japanese: Japan’s Massive Importation of Foreign Audiovisual Comics Chapter Four: From Asō Yutaka to Tezuka Osamu: How Manga Made in Japan Adopted the Form of Audiovisual Comics Epilogue: The Myth of Manga as a “Traditional Mode of Expression” Brief Chronology List of Foreign Comics in Japan 1908-1945 List of Illustrations Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe Cyborg Caribbean examines a wide range of twenty-first-century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction texts, arguing that authors from Pedro Cabiya, Alexandra Pagan-Velez, and Vagabond Beaumont to Yasmin Silvia Portales, Erick Mota, and Yoss, Haris Durrani, and Rita Indiana Hernandez, among others, negotiate rhetorical legacies of historical techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. The authors span the Hispanic Caribbean and their respective diasporas, reflecting how science fiction as a genre has the ability to manipulate political borders. As both a literary and historical study, the book traces four different technologies—electroconvulsive therapy, nuclear weapons, space exploration, and digital avatars—that have transformed understandings of corporality and humanity in the Caribbean. By recognizing the ways that increased technology may amplify the marginalization of bodies based on race, gender, sexuality, and other factors, the science fiction texts studied in this book challenge oppressive narratives that link technological and sociopolitical progress. .Trade Review"By looking at the way Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican authors and performers use sci-fi to assert a decolonizing, post-humanist critique of technology, Ginsburg looks at the ways these technologies have amplified the marginalization of certain bodies based on race, gender, sexuality, and/or disability. From plantation economies, energy and nuclear disasters, to torture, and contemporary zombie genres, The Cyborg Caribbean is a brilliant study of the temporalities of sci-fi genres and their politics in the Spanish Caribbean."— Jossianna Arroyo, author of Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster "Samuel Ginsburg’s fascinating study argues for the political potential of science fiction in the Hispanic Caribbean, showing how contemporary writers and artists use the genre to illuminate technology’s role in repressive power structures in the region. Deftly tracing the presence of technologies ranging from electroconvulsive therapy to nuclear weapons to cybernetic avatars, Ginsburg’s analysis reveals the ways in which science fiction is itself a tool for both highlighting technology’s destructive effects on Caribbean bodies imagining things otherwise."— Emily A. Maguire, author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography "An exciting contribution to Caribbean studies, this book shows how Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican authors envision alternative lifeforms and personhood. Informed by a deep understanding of cyborg theory and posthumanism and a rigorous historical contextualization, The Cyborg Caribbean offers a fascinating look into all kinds of possible futures."— Antonio Córdoba, co-editor of Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science FictionTable of ContentsIntroduction: Broadcasting Resistance 1 Electroconvulsive Therapy: Treatment, Torture, and Electrified Bodies 2 Nuclear Weapons: Missiles, Radiation, and Archives 3 Space Exploration and Colonial Alienation 4 Disruptive Avatars and the Decoding of Caribbean Cyberspace Conclusion: New Caribbean Futures Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisThis open-access book investigates Francophone Caribbean literature by exploring and analyzing French seventeenth-century travel writings. The book argues for a literary re-examination of the representation of the early colonial Caribbean by proposing theoretical linkages to contemporary Caribbean theories of creolization and archipelagic thinking. Using Édouard Glissant’s notion of points of entanglement, Christina Kullberg claims that the historical, social, and political messiness of the Caribbean seventeenth century make for complex representations and expressions, generating textual instability despite the travelers’ apparent desires to domesticate the islands. Taking a synoptic approach to travel narratives in French from 1620 up to the publication of Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique in 1722, Kullberg examines textual instances where the islands and the peoples of this period disrupt and unsettle dominant French narratives and enter productively into the construction of knowledge and the representations of the region. Kullberg’s contribution is to read French early modern travels in situ as shaped by the archipelagic geography, its history and social formations in order to interrogate both the construction and the limitations of discourses of power. Table of ContentsChapter 1: Introduction. Chapter 2: Archipelagos.Chapter 3: Constructing the Self between Worlds.Chapter 4: Other tongues.Chapter 5: Conclusion...or Alternative Beginnings.

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Book SynopsisDurs Grünbein is the most significant poet and essayist in German today. No other modern German poet has written from such an emphatically European and global perspective, and this volume seeks to present the poet and his work to the English-speaking world in all their significance and breadth. Written by a line-up of international scholars and critics, the volume offers highly readable and wide-ranging essays on Grünbein’s substantial œuvre, complemented by specially commissioned material and an interview with the poet. It covers the German and European traditions, and engages with Grünbein’s works in the context of a number of relevant topics, such as ‘memory’, ‘urban life’, ‘mortality’, ‘love’, and ‘presence’; it also probes Grünbein’s sustained dialogue with the natural sciences and the visual arts.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisContemplating the aesthetic and narrative forms of material life in American fiction as well as theoretical concepts of materiality, The Literary Life of Things looks at renewed attention to the physical world within the humanities and social sciences, variously designated as new materialism or the material turn. Setting out from the observation that objects have a much-neglected life in fiction, Babette Barbel Tischleder aims to bring scenes of animation to the forefront and, by focusing on the trajectories of inanimate things, to ask how human aspirations, fantasies, practices, memories, and self-concepts rely upon the object world in American literature and culture.

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Book SynopsisJan Opolsky has primarily been viewed as an undistinguished hanger-on in the era of Czech literary decadence. Through close reading and detailed analysis of Opolsky's prose, however, Peter Butler argues that, far from his reputation as a literary lackey, Opolsky is a master of sustained narrative irony and an accomplished writer in his own right. Beyond Decadence evaluates archival sources and private correspondence between Opolsky and other literary figures, and includes a classified bibliography of Opolsky's work. Butler's introduction, meanwhile, offers an overview of the Czech decadent/symbolist literary and artistic movements, placing them within a larger European perspective. Redeeming a literary artist who has been nearly forgotten in the English-speaking world, Beyond Decadence will be of particular interest to students of Slavic and European literary history.

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Book SynopsisPeter Ackroyd's writing is obsessed with the defining heterogeneity of London its rich diversity of human experience, mood, and emotion, of actions and events, and of the tools through which all of this heterogeneity is represented and reenacted. But for Ackroyd, one of the foremost of the so-called "London writers," this energizing heterogeneity also has a sinister side, largely originating outside social norms and mainstream pathways of cultural production. Touching on everything from occult practices to the plotting of radical groups, crime and fraud, dubious scientific experiments, and popular, dramatic forms of ritual and entertainment, Ackroyd contends that these forces both contest prescribed cultural modes and supply the city with its characteristic dynamism and capacity for spiritual renewal. This idiosyncratic London construct is particularly prominent in Ackroyd's novels, in which his ideas about the city's nature and his connection to English literary sensibilities combine to create a distinct chronotope with its own spatial and temporal properties. A Horror and a Beauty explores this world through six defining aspects of the city as Ackroyd identifies them: the relationship between London's past and present, its uncanny manifestations, its felonious tendencies, its inhabitants' psychogeographic and antiquarian strategies, its theatricality, and its inherently literary character.

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Book SynopsisA new look at the development of innovative postwar writing in France, Britain, and the United States. The Avant-Postman explores a broad range of innovative postwar writing from France, Britain, and the United States. Taking James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a joint starting point, David Vichnar draws genealogical lines from there through the work of more than fifty writers up to very recent years, including William Burroughs, B. S. Johnson, Ian Sinclair, Kathy Acker, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace, and many others. Centering the exploration around five strategies employed by Joyce—narrative parallax, stylistic metempsychosis, concrete writing, forgery, and neologizing the logos—the book reveals the striking continuities and developments from Joyce’s day to our own.Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION. JOYCE THE AVANT-1. Preliminary notes on the novel, experiment, and the avant-garde2. Joyce the avant-gardist: the Wake in transition3. transition in the Wake: Joyce the transitionist4. A Joycean avant-garde: parallax, metempsychosis, concretism, forgery, and neologism5. Joycean (?) traditions: Hayman, Adams, Werner, Levitt6. Post-JoyceCHAPTER 1. JOYCE DE NOUVEAU: “WITHIN OR BEHIND OR BEYOND OR ABOVE” THE NEW NOVEL, 1947–671.1 “Equivalent images, analogous sensations”: Nathalie Sarraute1.2 “The Additional Step in Subverting the System”: Alain Robbe-Grillet1.3 “Forever advancing on shifting sands”: Claude Simon1.4 “Anamnesis of leitmotifs”: Robert Pinget1.5 “To fail this way, in a superhuman attempt”: Claude Mauriac1.6 “Do whatever you can to get the most out of it”: Michel ButorCHAPTER 2. “BUT HOW MANY HAVE FOLLOWED HIM?” JOYCE IN BRITAIN, 1955–752.1 “A horroshow crack on the ooko or earhole”: Anthony Burgess2.2 “The Einstein of the novel”: B. S. Johnson2.3 “This distanced technique of writing from the unconscious”: Alan Burns2.4 “The voyce crying in the wilderness, rejoice with me”: Brigid Brophy2.5 “A death wish and a sense of sin”: Ann Quin2.6 “Who’s she when she’s (not) at home”: Christine Brooke-Rose, 1964–75CHAPTER 3. MAKING JOYCE “PART OF THE LANDSCAPE”:AMERICAN LITERARY EXPERIMENT, 1953–19733.1 “A new mythology for the space age”: William S. Burroughs3.2 “The self who could do more”: William Gaddis3.3 “That style which deliberately exhausts its possibilities”: John Barth3.4 “Never cut when you can paste”: William H. Gass3.5 “The book remains problematic, unexhausted”: Donald Barthelme3.6 “Orpheus Puts Down Harp”: Thomas PynchonCHAPTER 4. JOYCEAN OULIPO, OULIPIAN JOYCE4.1 The joys of constraint and potential4.2 “Nothing left to chance”: Raymond Queneau4.3 “A man of letters”: Georges Perec4.4 “A pre-modern, encyclopedic cast of mind”: Harry Mathews4.5 “The Babel effect”: Jacques Roubaud 4.6 The anticipatory plagiaristCHAPTER 5. “THE CENTENARIAN STILL SEEMS AVANT-GARDE”:EXPERIMENT IN BRITISH FICTION, 1976–20065.0 “Of the dissolution of character”: Christine Brooke-Rose, 1984–20065.1 “Life’s too shored to embark on it now”: Brian W. Aldiss5.2 “Packed with meaningless local references”: J.G. Ballard5.3 “A polyglot babble like a symphonic Euro-language”: Angela Carter 5.4 “Realism is anti-art”: Jeanette Winterson5.5 “Great art should not move”: Alasdair Gray5.6 “Grafting, editing: quotations, correspondences”: Iain SinclairCHAPTER 6. “THE FUNNYMENTAL NOVEL OF OUR ERROR”:JOYCEAN AVANT-GARDE IN U.S. FICTION, 1973–19976.0 “‘Realism,’ the optical illusion of reality in capitalist thought”: Language poetry6.1 “That level of activity that reveals life as fiction”: Raymond Federman 6.2 “A novel as a concrete structure rather than an allegory”: Ronald Sukenick6.3 “Another awareness, another alphabet”: Walter Abish 6.4 “The parodying punning pre-Joycean cakewalk”: Ishmael Reed6.5 “Does language control like money?”: Kathy Acker6.6 “The joyous heresy that will not go away”: Gilbert SorrentinoCHAPTER 7. JOYCE AS SUCH / TEL QUEL JOYCE7.1 Tel Quel’s “Enigmatic Reserve”7.2 “A certain type of Excess“: Jean-Louis Houdebine7.3 “Dis: Yes – I.R.A.”: Maurice Roche7.4 “As close as possible to that unheard-of place”: Hélène Cixous7.5 “A subject illimitable, numberless”: Philippe Sollers7.6 “An avatar of catholicity”: Beyond Tel QuelCHAPTER 8. POST-2000 CODA: CONCEPTUAL JOYCE8.1 “Misinterpreting the avant-garde”: Raczymow, Hadengue, Levé8.2 Breaking “the recursive loops of realism”: Mitchell, Hall, Home, Moore8.3 “Crucial to the health of the ecosystem”: Amerika, Foster Wallace, Goldsmith, Danielewski, CohenCONCLUSION. JOYCE THE POST-1. Countersigning Joyce’s signature2. A Joycean postmodernism: “Rituals originating in piety”3. Joycean anti-postmodernists4. Revis(it)ing the Joycean tradition: “His producers are they not his consumers?”5. Genealogies of parallax, metempsychosis, trace, forgery, and neologism6. Joyce’s baroque error: “One more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at”

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Book SynopsisAn inclusive collection of modern Czech short fiction that features overlooked women writers. Bringing together Czech fiction published by women between 1890 and 1910, Beyond the World of Men presents works that confront pivotal issues of the time, including the “woman question” and women’s rights, class conflict, lesbian love, and the relationship between the aristocracy and the Czech peasantry (as in two stories originally written in German by the aristocrat Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach). The collection contains stories that are of literary merit, but also hold historical value. In these works, the authors offer trenchant social commentary while injecting both comic and sentimental elements into their writing, employing humanity and subtlety. As a whole, the collection suggests a revision of the critical understanding of Czech literary modernism; these writers represent voices that were not usually heard in the male writing of the period. They also demand evaluation in their differing (but constant) reactions to earlier women’s writing in Czech and in other European languages, but particularly that of the central figure of Božena Nemcová, to whose canonic novel Babicka they constantly return.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments and sourcesCzech Women’s Fiction at the Fin de Siècle: Beyond the World of MenBiographical notes on authorsBibliographyMarie von Ebner-Eschenbach He Kisses Your Hand (1885)Tereza Nováková A Kaleidoscope (1890)Božena Viková-Kunetická Confirmed Bachelors (1891)Ružena Svobodová Life’s Sorrow (1891–5)Tereza Svatová A Visit to His Parents (1894)Tereza Svatová The ‘Práže’: A Prague Bastard (1894)Vladimíra Jedlicková Tale About Nothing, no. 5 (1903)Vladimíra Jedlicková Tale About Nothing, no. 14 (1903)Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach Daily Life (1904)Anna Maria Tilschová A Widow (1905)Anna Maria Tilschová A Rose for Uncle: An Unserious Tale of a VeryYoung Coquette, with a Moral (1906)Božena Benešová Theories (1906)Marie Majerová A Tale from Hell (1907)Marie Majerová Marriage (1907)Božena Benešová A Loyal Wife (1908)Anna Lauermannová-Mikschová Solitude (1908)Helena Malírová Three Points of View (1908)Ružena Svobodová ... And Music will be Playing Outside YourWindows Every Day! (1908)Ružena Jesenská The Death of Ophelia (1909)Ružena Jesenská A Truthful Tale of a Stone Statue (1909)Lila Bubelová The Child (1912)Marie Majerová A Thorny Question (1917)Anna Maria Tilschová A Remarkable Incident (1924)Lida Merlínová Marie and Marta (1933)

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Book SynopsisJoseph Conrad’s Authorial Self is organized around the category of the author with some illuminating aspects of Conrad’s Polishness as the major area of consideration. It starts with a theoretical treatment of Conrad’s authorship, continues through a focus on autobiography along with his creative process, proceeds with analyses of his ideas derived from his Polish heritage as presented in his personality and oeuvre, and moves on to biographies of the writer’s relatives. This set is followed by papers on “Amy Foster,” a short story of strong Polish resonance and a classic of émigré literature, considerations of translations of his works into Polish, and essays on central/south-central Europe and the sea.The main integrative concept of authorial self is supported by two secondary principles: delimitation by the geographical area covered: mainly Poland, but also Russia and central and south-central Europe, and the chronology of Joseph Conrad’s life and works, from influences upon Konradek in Lwów and the significance of East Carpathian poetics to juxtapositions of his oeuvre with early twentieth century authors as well as a contemporary Polish author and translations of his works. The final five papers span the whole period studied in this volume, from the first Polish translation published in 1897 to one of the most recent in 2011, from possible influences upon Conrad in his childhood and youth to the most recent reception of his works in the Balkans.This book is volume 27 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wiesław Krajka.Table of ContentsWiesław Krajka: IntroductionNathalie Martinière: Like a Damaged Kaleidoscope: Multiple Contemporary Images of Joseph ConradRichard Ambrosini: A Memoir “in the shape of a novel”: Making the “still voice” of Conrad’s Polish Past Resonate in A Personal RecordG. W. Stephen Brodsky: Anchors and Mirrors: Joseph Conrad’s Polonism EncodedHarold Ray Stevens: “A tall cross much out of the perpendicular”: Some Christian Contexts in Conrad’s Life, Letters, and “Heart of Darkness”Lilia Omelan: “A Man of Great Heart and Devotion”: Antoni Syroczynski and His Role in Young Konrad’s EducationLilia Omelan: Leon Syroczynski: a Patriot, an Insurgent, a Scholar, and His Connections to ConradAnna Brzozowska-Krajka: Conrad’s Borderland (Kresy) Regionalism from the Perspective of Geopoetics. The Case of “Amy FosterWiesław Krajka: Between Mental Spaces of the Self and the Other in “Amy Foster”: Dialogue of Cultures and Values? Alterity? Hospitality?Carl Schaffer: “They ain’t where they belong to be at”: Conrad’s and O’Connor’s Displaced PolesMonika Majewska: “a somewhat discredited sentiment”? Conrad, Tolstoy and Zdziechowski on PatriotismRafał Szczerbakiewicz: “Close-hauled points of sail and fore topmast upper staysails in space.” Stanisław Lem and Joseph ConradEwa Kujawska-Lis: Conrad’s Introduction to the Polish Literary Scene: Wygnaniec (1897) (An Outcast of the Islands) by Maria GasiorowskaAgnieszka Adamowicz-Pospiech: A Set of Three: Polish Versions of Joseph Conrad’s “Il Conde”Olga Binczyk and Grzegorz Gwózdz: Imagining the Never-Experienced: Aniela Zagórska’s and Magda Heydel’s Translations of “Heart of Darkness”Majda Šavle: Two Poles on the High Seas or How (not) to Circumvent a “Typhoon”Margreta Grigorova and Petya Tsoneva: Perspectives on the Contemporary Bulgarian Cultural Space: Conrad, Bulgarians and the SeaIndex of Non-Fictional NamesIndex of Conrad’s Works and Letters

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Book SynopsisJoseph Conrad’s ethical perspective is one of the deepest in twentieth-century fiction, yet its study has been overlooked in recent scholarship. Joseph Conrad and Ethics is one of very few books fully devoted to ethics in Conrad’s fiction. It offers a thorough, in-depth analysis of Conrad’s ethical reflection that challenges and extends current scholarly discussions.The authors of this theoretically informed, accessible volume examine Conrad’s representation of ethics through the lens of Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Ricoeur, among others, and confront Conrad’s ethical perspective to these philosophers’ views. Through detailed studies of works like “Heart of Darkness,” The Secret Agent, Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes, they navigate the conflicted terrain of ethics and morality, highlighting the enmeshment of ethics and aesthetics, ethics and narrative, and ethics and ideology in Conrad’s fiction. The key issues they address include the ethics of storytelling and readership, ethical commitment and detachment, the ethics of uncertainty and uneasiness, and planetary ethics and ethical disillusionment. Conrad is ambivalent about ethics and this interdisciplinary volume pivots around a fundamental Conradian ethical paradox: how to account for ethical responsibility in a world not meant for ethics in the first place and, as Conrad stated, whose “aim cannot be ethical at all.” It demonstrates that Conrad adopts a planetary ethics that embraces the human condition in its universality, while he also doubts the viability of ethics itself. Via his protagonists’ moral predicaments he expresses both the necessity of ethics in human relationships and the impossibility of individual ethical fulfillment.The book is volume 30 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wiesław Krajka. It explores a major, understudied Conradian topic – Ethics, and adds an important thematic and theoretical dimension to this series. The chapters are written by experts from various universities worldwide, in keeping with the international, cosmopolitan spirit of Eastern and Western Perspectives. The authors’ wide-ranging, original perspectives on ethics open new venues in Conrad scholarship that will greatly benefit scholars and students of Conrad, modernism, and ethics.Table of ContentsAmar Acheraïou: IntroductionAmar Acheraïou: Narrative and Ethics: Being, Meaning, and ReadingAileen Miyki Farrar: Narrative Autophagy and the Ethics of Storytelling in “Heart of Darkness”J. A. Bernstein: Under Straining Eyes: Joseph Conrad and the Problem of “Moral Luck” Thomas Higgins: “He died for the Revolution”: Anarchism and Ethical Commitment in The Secret AgentCatherine Delesalle-Nancey: Ethics as The Secret Agent in Joseph Conrad’s NovelLaëtitia Crémona: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics in Hitchcock’s SabotageNathalie Martinière: An Ethics of Uneasiness: Reading Joseph Conrad’s African stories with Francis BaconSubhadeep Ray: “After such knowledge what forgiveness?”: Nature, Community and Individual Ethics in Joseph Conrad’s “Because of the Dollars” and Adwaita Mallabarman’s A River Called TitasHarold Ray Stevens: The Cross of Christ as Afterthought: Killing the Christian Ethic at “An Outpost of Progress”

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Book SynopsisJoseph Conrad and Material Culture offers a fresh approach to Conrad’s work, especially his African fictions, by grounding its discussion in the importance of material culture and its role in shaping the literary art form in modernity. Opening with the description of a uniquely carved African tusk as both a work of art and an object of material culture, Merry M. Pawlowski traces the scenes of African life displayed on that tusk to establish the major themes of her study of selected works of Conrad’s fiction and nonfiction. These themes include the presence of transculturation in colonial Africa, the transformation of the African fetish into the commodity fetish, the exploitation of the African continent through mapping, exploration, and trade, and the rise of the transcendent commodity. Employing cartographic, materialist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial theories as frameworks, Pawlowski offers new insights using details, liminal presences, in Conrad’s texts enhanced by key illustrations to expand those details as revelatory of the broader material culture invoked by the text. The brief mention of a Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin, the single reference to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the intriguing hint of a vile scramble for loot, are a few examples of tantalizing textual presences. Pawlowski explores the presence of material culture through teasing out gaps, silences, and hints deployed in Conrad’s works. Revealing the rich context on which Conrad drew as he wrote, this book offers an opportunity for the reader to enter Conrad’s world through envisioning the defamiliarizing spaces from which he drew inspiration for his art.This book is volume 31 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wiesław Krajka.Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION: The Commodity TranscendentCHAPTER ONE: “Autocracy and War,” the Age of Capital, and the Rise of the Commodity TranscendentCHAPTER TWO: Spectral Sightings, Mapping, and Exploration in “Geography and Some ExplorersCHAPTER THREE: A Witness in the Congo: Conrad’s “The Congo Diary” and “Up-river Book”CHAPTER FOUR: “An Outpost of Progress”: ‘The lightest part of the loot I carried off from Central Africa’”CHAPTER FIVE: “Heart of Darkness”: Conrad’s Centerpiece in the Congo”CONCLUSION: Conrad, Commodities, and the Work of Art

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Book SynopsisThe publication Places and Spaces of Crime in Popular Imagination is part of the Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English Series. The text reflects growing interest in popular literary genres not only among the readers, but mainly in literary research. This still rather under-researched area is now representing fertile grounds for various theoretical approaches. As the publication mainly declares its interest in crime-related genres, its focus on place is justifiable: it reflects the postmodern "spatial turn", manifested in an increased emphasis on the location of crime, not necessarily in the sense of the crime scene itself, but as a socio-geographical place and space. The setting of crime has a specific and well-defined role in the traditional crime genres, but this role has been redefined in the modern versions of crime-related fiction. ranging from educating the reader in certain areas, bringing up current problems, deepening the psychological aspect of individual characters etc. The published volume brings forth various aspects of this new role of place in popular genres centering on crime and gives space to its deeper analysis. It is not the researchers? objective to provide overviews of the history of the theoretical discussion of place and space in literature in general. Instead, although the essays do employ a variety of critical approaches, the collection strives to show practically how place and space is employed in the specific material of the selected works.The seven chapters are written by scholars from the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. Two essays represent London as a topos and a chronotope in the works by contemporary British writers of crime fiction. The selection is to show how varied the literary London can be, albeit in the often rather formulaic popular genre. The essays also document a shift from the country setting typical for the British Golden Age of detective fiction to the more recent urban focus. One contribution focuses on the genre of spy novel to show how rendering of place and space can contribute to the genre's typical atmosphere of suspense, secrets and disquiet. Four more essays analyze a variety of places and spaces in American crime fiction, crime comics and crime film. All of the places are in some way specific to American milieu – the suburbia, the university campus, the wilderness, a holiday resort with a state park. These essays are designed to show the contemporary variety of places where crime literature (or film) is set and to document a shift from the traditional urban setting of American hard-boiled fiction to a far greater recent diversity.The volume brings together most recent central European research on the topic of place and community in popular imagination. Thus, it represents a unique insight into this growing phenomenon, which can no longer be overlooked by the academic community.

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Book SynopsisThis volume presents a galaxy of traditional and modern critical approaches to Joseph Conrad's oeuvre, ranging from biographical and autobiographical studies to literary comparisons with John Milton, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Cormac McCarthy; from postcolonial and Marxist analyses to reader-response, intertextual, and archetypal criticism. Some pieces incorporate the theoretical-philosophical insights of Josiah Royce, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan; others consult Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha, and Slavoj Zizek. Apart from Conrad's life and its reflection in his writings, these essays illuminate such thematics as the critique of reality; nationalism; imperial evil; racism; landscape and truth; impressionism; psychological archetypes; doubling and defamiliarization; alienation and selfhood; the uncanny; imaginary identification and the real; ideology as specter; unconditional hospitality; the theory of whirling and veering; and academic teachings of Conrad, both their past character and future possibilities.

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Book SynopsisConrad in Italy provides international students and researchers with a variety of critical approaches. Richard Ambrosini surveys Conrad's reception within the Italian academy. Franco Marenco's essay on "Heart of Darkness" outlines Conrad's centrality in English Modernism. Alessandro Serpieri deals with Conrad's impressionistic treatment of space in The Secret Agent and other texts. Giuseppe Sertoli focuses on Conrad's debt to the Comtesse de Boigne's Memoires and to James's Portrait of a Lady in the writing of Suspense. Fausto Ciompi investigates the isotopy of dream in Lord Jim and other early novels. Elio Di Piazza reads the The Mirror of the Sea as an inquiry into British and Russian empires. Maria Teresa Chialant's study of "Amy Foster" and "Tomorrow" accounts for the interest of Italian critics in Conrad's minor works. Francesco Marroni unfolds the moral structure of "The Secret Sharer". Nicoletta Vallorani tackles the theme of the double in "The Secret Sharer" from the perspective of the art of photography. Luisa Villa illuminates the complex structure of Chance in the light of Conrad's re-elaboration of the Victorian multi-plot novel. Mario Domenichelli proposes a reading of Conrad's cooperation with Ford. The Inheritors is the subject of Mario Curreli's essay on Conrad's debt to H.G. Wells, Zangwill, and Drumont, while it places the issue of fourth-dimension in the context of European colonialisms. Marialuisa Bignami's survey of Conrad's influence on Primo Levi and Marilena Saracino's intertextual analysis of "Heart of Darkness" and Luigi Guarneri's Tenebre sul Congo are two exercises in dialogic reading which confirm Conrad's well-established reception in Italian culture.Table of ContentsMario Curreli: Introduction Mario Curreli: An Outline of Conrad's Reception in ItalyRichard Ambrosini: "The Battle for Conrad": Inside and Outside Italian Academia in the Years 1924-1960Alessandro Serpieri: Joseph Conrad: Many Landscapes, a Single Space Franco Marenco: "And I saw my mystake": Joseph Conrad and the Narrative of a Critical CenturyFausto Ciompi: Conrad and Dream: Almayer's FollyI, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Lord JimMaria Teresa Chialant: The Figure of the Outsider in "Amy Foster" and "To-morrow"Mario Domenichelli, Conrad and Hueffer: From Three Collaborative Novels to High ModernismMario Curreli: Conrad's and Ford Four Dimensional Story: "The Inheritors"Elio Di Piazza: The Wind of Empire in Conrad's "rulers iof East and West"Francesco Marroni: Evil and Non-Evil in "The Secret Sharer"Nicoletta Vallorani: The Brotherhood of Twins: Conrad's "The Secret Sharer and Photography"Luisa Villa: Young Powell's Story and Its Conradian Inter-text: Re-reading Chance "for the Plot"Giuseppe Sertoli: Conrad's Portrait of a LadyMarialuisa Bignami: The Presence of Joseph Conrad in Primo Levi's OeuvreMarilena Saracino: "Heart of Darkness" and Tenebre sul Congo: History, Memory and Writing

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Book SynopsisBorn into a Polish szlachta (noble) family, the extraordinary modern novelist Joseph Conrad maintained, even in exile, strong ties to his Polish heritage and culture. Yet the author earned renown by writing in English, often about nautical adventures in remote parts of the world. In Joseph Conrad's Polish Soul, G. W. Stephen Brodsky seeks to reclaim the essentially Polish sensibility of Conrad's groundbreaking oeuvre. He finds in Conrad's work a distinct Polonism that plays intriguingly with selfhood, freedom, and irony. For Brodsky, Conrad's outlook and writing betray numerous contradictions. Despite the novelist's practical realism, Conrad was drawn to romance, orientalism, and the exotic. Frequently sick, he nevertheless pursued a life at sea. He despised adventurers, yet loved risk. An instinctive skepticism, conservatism, and nationalism complicated his liberalism and respect for humanity, and though he resigned himself to Poland's tragic destiny, Conrad refused to despair over the terribleness of his times. In this incomparable study, Brodsky shows how these inherent aspects of Conrad's personality inform and guide his Polonism, along with the best attributes of his fiction.Table of ContentsDedication Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction by George Zbigniew Gasyna Chapter One A Familiar Preface to Joseph Conrad's Polish Soul Chapter Two Under Western Eyes Conrad's Two Pasts-Thirty Years of Critical Misrule and a Renaissance Chapter Three Dispossession Encoded: Conrad as Exile Chapter Four Conrad's Brody Secret Sharers Jozef Korzeniowski, Joseph Roth, and other Children of the Borderland Chapter Five A Janus Gate Conrad's Krakow in Marseille Chapter Six Dogs and Duels: Englishman Conrad's Franco-Polish Honor, Fraudulent and Genuine Chapter Seven Darkness Visible in Conrad's Polish Orient: Anglo-Polish Orientalism and the Exotic in the Malay Tales Chapter Eight An Ironist's Harlequinade: Conrad's Unified Polish Comic Spirit Chapter Nine Saint Roman: Patriotism, Sanctity, and Mytho-History in "Prince Roman" Epilogue End Notes Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe late 16th-century novel Jin Ping Mei has been described as a landmark in the development of the narrative art form, there being no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature. However, it is also seen as something of a wild horse, its graphically explicit depiction of sexuality earning it great notoriety. Although Jin Ping Mei was banned soon after its appearance, today the novel is considered one of the six classics of Chinese literature. It is thus no surprise that Jin Ping Mei has caught the attention of scholars working in many different fields, places and periods. Unfortunately, the interdisciplinary and transnational exchange has been limited here, in part because of distance and language barriers. The present volume aims to bridge this gap, bringing together the best quality research on Jin Ping Mei by both established and emerging scholars. Not only will it showcase research on Jin Ping Mei but also it will function as a reader, helping future generations to understand and appreciate this important work.

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Book SynopsisThe first full-length autobiography in Bengali, Amar Jiban (My Life) was written in the early nineteenth century by an upper-caste rural housewife named Rashundari Debi. Published in 1868 when she was eighty-eight years old, the book is a fascinating snapshot of life for women in the nineteenth century. Debi, who gave birth to eleven children - her first was born when she was eighteen years old, the last when she was forty-one - ruminates on her very individual understanding of bhakti beliefs as well as the new times that were unfolding around her. Offering a translation of major sections of this remarkable autobiography, Words to Win is a portrait of a woman who wants to compose a life of her own, wishes to present it in the public sphere, and eventually accomplishes just that. The words, in the end, win out. First published in 1999, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in nineteenth-century Indian history. The classic text is reissued here in a new paperback format.Trade Review"Tanika Sarkar's dissection of the text-the autobiography of an upper-caste East Bengali widow from a family of landlords, who teaches herself to read and write in secrecy as it's a taboo to do so-yields a cracking yarn of social history." (Pothik Ghosh, Outlook)"

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Book SynopsisThis book is written by Professor JIN Di, whose translation of ""Ulysses into Chinese"" is now commonly recognized as a substantial, even monumental, work. The text contains three parts. Part I provides an informative context for the Chinese Ulysses and the fascinating story of the origins of Jin's project. In Part II, there is wisdom to offer on the principles of translation, reflecting from the detailed account of the problems on bridging linguistic and cultural barriers during the translation process. The last part recounts the encounter between James Joyce and Chinese culture. This book speaks to readers across a broad variety of disciplines, from Joyceans, literature enthusiasts and translators, to sociologists, communication researchers and general readers.

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