Literary studies: from c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.In her second volume of essays, Virginia Woolf delves deeper into the delights of reading. Here, she explores the novels of Thomas Hardy and Daniel Defoe, and recounts the fascinating lives of Christina Rossetti and Mary Wollstonecraft. In How Should One Read a Book?' she offers sage advice for the common reader, and sheds light on the lessons and pleasures literature can provide.Published in 1932, The Common Reader: Second Series is a wise and illuminating companion collection to her 1925 First Series. Woolf's enduring appeal and ideas continue to resonate with readers in the twenty-first century.

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Book SynopsisA sparkling collection of journalism from the critically acclaimed author of BAD BLOOD and MOMENTS OF TRUTH.Trade ReviewPraise for GOOD AS HER WORD: 'A tremendous and bracing read that almost brings Sage back to life … Dazzling, erudite pieces.' Observer 'A brilliant collection … When reading her reviews, you get a wonderful feeling of collusion, of attending the best kind of party which mixes great warmth with sophistication.' Time Out 'Smart …. At her epigrammatic best' Daily Telegraph Praise for MOMENTS OF TRUTH ‘Packed with razor-sharp observations and exhilerating humour.’ Sunday Times ‘Thank goodness for Lorna Sage’s brilliant ‘Moments of Truth’. Going into a book with her is like going into a gloomy church, say, in some some foreign city: her eyes adjust to the light so fast she can see the frescoes, and describe them to you in vivd detail, while you are still blinking like a mole.’ Financial Times This is writerly criticism – down to earth, incisive, peppered with memorable phrases – and it makes exhilarating reading.’ Irish Times ‘An apt memorial to a brilliant and stimulating mind.’ Literary Review

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Book SynopsisRaymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he left an indelible imprint on the detective novel. Fredric Jameson offers an interpretation of Chandler's work that reconstructs both the context in which it was written and the social world or totality it projects. Chandler's invariable setting, Los Angeles, appears both as a microcosm of the United States and a prefiguration of its future: a megalopolis uniquely distributed by an unpromising nature into a variety of distinct neighborhoods and private worlds. But this essentially urban and spatial work seems also to be drawn towards a vacuum, an absence that is nothing other than death. With Chandler, the thriller genre becomes metaphysical.Trade ReviewFredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction. -- Terry EagletonNot often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. The best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you'd always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. -- Benjamin Kunkel * London Review of Books *Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today . it can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him. -- Colin MacCabeThe most muscular of writers. * Times Literary Supplement *Even the most anti-Marxian among us, [will] find ourselves compelled, if not to accept the book's intricate hypotheses, at least to accord them an ungrudged admiration for the brilliance of their formulation and the serene and quietly convinced tone in which they are advanced. -- John Banville * New York Review of Books *The small length of Jameson's book adds a tightness to its arguments and the style is often Chandler-esque: words are not wasted, literary observations are pin-sharp and there are some wry aperçu. Winningly, Jameson occasionally employs the genre's rhetoric, so his theorising becomes the pursuing of "lines of enquiry", a "procedure", etc. It's touches like this that make Jameson such a joy to read -- Cornelius Fitz * 3AM Magazine *

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Book SynopsisExam Board: AQALevel: GCSE Grade 9-1Subject: English LiteratureSuitable for the 2024 examsEverything you need to revise for your GCSE 9-1 set text in a snap guideEverything you need to score top marks on your GCSE Grade 9-1 English Literature exam is right at your fingertips! Revise Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro in a snap with this new GCSE Grade 9-1 Snap Revision Text Guide from Collins. Refresh your knowledge of the plot, context, characters and themes and pick up top tips along the way to ace your AQA exam. Each topic is explained in an easy-to-read format so you can get straight to the point. Then, put your skills to the test with plenty of practice questions included in every section. The Snap Text Guides are packed with every quote and extract you need. We've even included examples of how to plan and write your essay responses! This Collins English Literature revision guide contains all the key information you need to practise and pass.

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Book Synopsis[Cappello''s] excellent new book-length essay, Lecture... at once defends the lecture and calls for holistic and creative improvements to the form.—The AtlanticIn twenty-first century America, there is so much that holds or demands our attention without requiring it. Imagine the lecture as a radical opening.Mary Cappello''s Lecture is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture. Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture''s capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many formsfrom the aphorism to the noteand give new life to knowledge's dramatic form.

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Book SynopsisFresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discTable of ContentsVolume I About the Editors Contributors Introduction XXX - XXX Volume II XXX - XXX Index

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Book SynopsisThe Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Long Story Short Nadine Gordimer: Past, Present, and Future A Moment’s Monument: Counter-Monuments in Ivan Vladislavić Zoë Wicomb and the “Problem of Class” Phaswane Mpe’s Aesthetics of Brooding Spatial Form in Henrietta Rose-Innes Conclusion: Small Medium at Large

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Book SynopsisOffers readings of key contemporary trends and themes in the vibrant genre of short-story writing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, with attention to major practitioners and translations of two representative stories. Since the 1990s, the short story has re-emerged in the German-speaking world as a vibrant literary genre, serving as a medium for both literary experimentation and popular forms. Authors like Judith Hermann and Peter Stamm have had a significant impact on German-language literary culture and, in translation, on literary culture in the UK and USA. This volume analyzes German-language short-story writing in the twenty-first century, aiming to establish a framework for further research into individual authors as well as key themes and formal concerns. An introduction discusses theories of the short-story form and literary-aesthetic questions. A combination of thematic and author-focused chapters then discuss key developments in the contemporary German-language context, examining performance and performativity, Berlin and crime stories, and the openendness, fragmentation, liminality, and formal experimentations that characterize short stories in the twenty-first century. Together the chapters present the rich field of short-story writing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, offering a variety of theoretical approaches to individual stories and collections, as well as exploring connections with storytelling, modernist short prose, and the novella. The volume concludes with a survey of broad trends, and three original translations exemplifying the breadth of contemporary German-language short-story writing.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Note on Translations Introduction to the Contemporary Short Story in German - Andrew Plowman, Lyn Marven, and Kate Roy Chapter 1: Berlin Shorts: The German Capital in the Short Story of the Twenty-First Century - Katharina Gerstenberger Chapter 2: The German Crime Story in the Twenty-First Century - Todd Herzog Chapter 3: Performance, Performativity, and the Contemporary German Kurzgeschichte - Emily Spiers Chapter 4: Cramped Spaces, Creative Bottlenecks: Sudabeh Mohafez's das zehn-zeilen-buch and the Short-Short - Kate Roy Chapter 5: Bodo Kirchhoff's Widerfahrnis: A Novelle for Our Time? - Helmut Schmitz Chapter 6: The Liminal Space of the Short Story: Clemens Meyer's Die Nacht, die Lichter and Die stillen Trabanten - Gillian Pye Chapter 7: Framing the Presence: Judith Hermann's Lettipark - Leonhard Herrmann Chapter 8: Of Unhomed Subjects and Unsettled Voices: Alois Hotschnig's Die Kinder beruhigte das nicht - Heide Kunzelmann Chapter 9: Literary Development and Rewriting Spaces in the "Complete Stories": Peter Stamm's Der Lauf der Dinge - Andrew Plowman Chapter 10: On Disappearing: Reading Ulrike Almut Sandig with Sylvia Bovenschen - Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa Chapter 11: Metamorphic Becomings: Yoko Tawada's Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen - Áine McMurtry Chapter 12: Melinda Nadj Abonji and Jurczok 1001: Performance, Politics, and Poetry - Rafaël Newman and Caroline Wiedmer Chapter 13: Rhizomatic Wanderings: The Writings of Gabriele Petricek - Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger Chapter 14: Trends and Issues in the Contemporary German-Language Short Story - Lyn Marven Appendix: Contemporary German-Language Short Stories in Translation Sudabeh Mohafez, A Short-Short Selection - Translated by Kate Roy Roman Ehrlich, "Engineers of Time" - Translated by Lyn Marven Saša Stanišić, "The Factory" - Translated by Lyn Marven Bibliography of Primary Texts Notes on Contributors

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Book SynopsisA wide-ranging account of the twenty-first century's fascination with the weird. Twenty-first-century fiction and theory have taken a decidedly weird turn. They both show a marked interest in the nonhuman and in the preternatural moods that the nonhuman often evokes. Writers of fiction and criticism are avidly experimenting with strange, even alien perspectives and protagonists. Kate Marshall's Novels by Aliens explores this development broadly while focusing on problems of genre fiction. She identifies three key generic hybrids that harness a longing for the nonhuman: the old weird, an alternative tradition within naturalism and modernism for the twenty-first century's cowboys and aliens; cosmic realism, the reach for words legible only from space in otherwise terrestrial narratives; and pseudoscience fiction, which imagines speculative futures beyond human life on earth. Offering sharp and surprising insights about a breathtaking range of authors, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to KazTrade Review"[An] excellent new book. . . . For Marshall. . . the Weird, in its many manifestations, stands at the center of contemporary literary culture — so long as we know where and how to see it." -- Jess Keiser * The Washington Post *“To a novelistic landscape populated by zombies, trees, amnesiacs, robots, and geological traces of an unimaginable past, you'll find no surer guide than Kate Marshall. But Novels by Aliens is an introduction to far more than the semi-human wilds of recent fiction. As we learn in these beautifully argued pages, the novel has been weird for centuries—indeed, perhaps never more than when it has most aimed to be realist. In retheorizing the form itself, Marshall demonstrates the importance of fictional thinking to contemporary dilemmas that themselves prove to be less novel than we often assume.” * Jennifer Fleissner, Indiana University Bloomington *“Marshall’s electrifying book takes us on a tour of early twenty-first-century novels that want to be narrated by Martians—but also landscapes, animals, monsters, artificial intelligences, and myriad other nonhuman entities. Though this desire for a radically external perspective often fails, novel forms of sentience, and the worlds they inhabit or imagine, come to structure thought experiments that speculate their way through problems as seemingly unrepresentable as human extinction. With an ambitious scope and synthetic skill, this book connects classic literary texts by writers such as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris to contemporary work by novelists such as Teju Cole, Colson Whitehead, and Marilynne Robinson. Novels by Aliens succeeds at making our world feel weirder and more alien in ways that ultimately make it far more available to thought.” * Patrick Jagoda, University of Chicago *“Dense yet expansive, this study illuminates whole worlds—and the very edges of the known world. Marshall has a preternatural gift for getting to the point. Read this whole book for a surefooted survey of the novel’s most exorbitant possibilities presented with peerless critical depth and balance. Ranging across the Wild Wests of capitalism before 1900 and after 2000, Marshall shows us novels aiming to cut loose from the human subject while remaining tethered to the genre histories of frontier naturalism and the old weird.” * Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania *“Marshall remains the same scholar whose ‘The Old Weird’ made such a suggestive genealogy between the spooky aspects of Naturalism and the twenty-first century revival of gothic horror. Novels by Aliens is an impressive account that gives readers a way to consider the irony of the Anthropocene being an era both of exaggerated human agency (to mar the planet) and also an era where the truly picayune nature of human agency and importance within a vaster world/universe comes more clearly into view.” * John Plotz, English, Brandeis University *“A timely and insightful study. . . This book has the potential to transform novel theory and literary criticism generally and to illustrate the important contribution both fiction and literary theory have to make to debates concerning humanity’s most urgent and pressing issues.” * Priscilla Wald, author of "Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative" *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dispatches from the Extinguished World 1 The Old Weird 2 Cowboys and Aliens 3 Cosmic Realism 4 The Novel in Geological Time 5 Pseudoscience Fictions 6 After Extinction Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"[An] excellent new book. . . . For Marshall. . . the Weird, in its many manifestations, stands at the center of contemporary literary culture — so long as we know where and how to see it." -- Jess Keiser * The Washington Post *“To a novelistic landscape populated by zombies, trees, amnesiacs, robots, and geological traces of an unimaginable past, you'll find no surer guide than Kate Marshall. But Novels by Aliens is an introduction to far more than the semi-human wilds of recent fiction. As we learn in these beautifully argued pages, the novel has been weird for centuries—indeed, perhaps never more than when it has most aimed to be realist. In retheorizing the form itself, Marshall demonstrates the importance of fictional thinking to contemporary dilemmas that themselves prove to be less novel than we often assume.” * Jennifer Fleissner, Indiana University Bloomington *“Marshall’s electrifying book takes us on a tour of early twenty-first-century novels that want to be narrated by Martians—but also landscapes, animals, monsters, artificial intelligences, and myriad other nonhuman entities. Though this desire for a radically external perspective often fails, novel forms of sentience, and the worlds they inhabit or imagine, come to structure thought experiments that speculate their way through problems as seemingly unrepresentable as human extinction. With an ambitious scope and synthetic skill, this book connects classic literary texts by writers such as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris to contemporary work by novelists such as Teju Cole, Colson Whitehead, and Marilynne Robinson. Novels by Aliens succeeds at making our world feel weirder and more alien in ways that ultimately make it far more available to thought.” * Patrick Jagoda, University of Chicago *“Dense yet expansive, this study illuminates whole worlds—and the very edges of the known world. Marshall has a preternatural gift for getting to the point. Read this whole book for a surefooted survey of the novel’s most exorbitant possibilities presented with peerless critical depth and balance. Ranging across the Wild Wests of capitalism before 1900 and after 2000, Marshall shows us novels aiming to cut loose from the human subject while remaining tethered to the genre histories of frontier naturalism and the old weird.” * Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania *“Marshall remains the same scholar whose ‘The Old Weird’ made such a suggestive genealogy between the spooky aspects of Naturalism and the twenty-first century revival of gothic horror. Novels by Aliens is an impressive account that gives readers a way to consider the irony of the Anthropocene being an era both of exaggerated human agency (to mar the planet) and also an era where the truly picayune nature of human agency and importance within a vaster world/universe comes more clearly into view.” * John Plotz, English, Brandeis University *“A timely and insightful study. . . This book has the potential to transform novel theory and literary criticism generally and to illustrate the important contribution both fiction and literary theory have to make to debates concerning humanity’s most urgent and pressing issues.” * Priscilla Wald, author of "Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative" *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dispatches from the Extinguished World 1 The Old Weird 2 Cowboys and Aliens 3 Cosmic Realism 4 The Novel in Geological Time 5 Pseudoscience Fictions 6 After Extinction Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisBearers of Risk examines how male Canadian writers mobilize the early twenty-first-century short story cycle as an illustration of post-9/11 recuperative masculinity politics. Neta Gordon unsettles scholarly positions on the inherent outsider status of the short story cycle and exposes the strategic unmarking of White, heteronormative men.

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Book SynopsisBearers of Risk examines how male Canadian writers mobilize the early twenty-first-century short story cycle as an illustration of post-9/11 recuperative masculinity politics. Neta Gordon unsettles scholarly positions on the inherent outsider status of the short story cycle and exposes the strategic unmarking of White, heteronormative men.

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Book SynopsisThis new collection on Michael Ondaatje’s work – the first in twenty years – offers an innovative analysis of the author’s oeuvre from 1967 to the present. In twenty essays, contributors explore Ondaatje’s poetry, novels, and work in film, highlighting the transnational, postcolonial, and diasporic issues apparent in his writings.Trade Review“Chock full of complex theoretical language, Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? will likely appeal to academic audiences (and determined CanLit enthusiasts). But general readers may find this insightful analysis a welcome supplement to their continued enjoyment of Ondaatje’s enduring works.” Literary Review of Canada

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Book SynopsisThis new collection on Michael Ondaatje’s work – the first in twenty years – offers an innovative analysis of the author’s oeuvre from 1967 to the present. In twenty essays, contributors explore Ondaatje’s poetry, novels, and work in film, highlighting the transnational, postcolonial, and diasporic issues apparent in his writings.Trade Review“Chock full of complex theoretical language, Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? will likely appeal to academic audiences (and determined CanLit enthusiasts). But general readers may find this insightful analysis a welcome supplement to their continued enjoyment of Ondaatje’s enduring works.” Literary Review of Canada

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Book SynopsisThe author of the acclaimed Gay Fiction Speaks brings us new interviews with twelve prominent gay writers who have emerged in the last decade. Hear Us Out demonstrates how in recent decades the canon of gay fiction has developed, diversified, and expanded its audience into the mainstream.Trade ReviewHear Us Out is going to become, like Richard Canning's previous book of interviews,Gay Fiction Speaks, a standard reference for scholars. That's an appropriately exalted, climate-controlled fate for a wonderful book... Canning has a wonderful knack for this work. -- David McConnell Lambda Book Report Canning offers up more of the meaty, critically rich interviews -- Christopher Hennessy The Gay and Lesbian ReviewTable of ContentsGary Indiana Bernard Cooper Christopher Bram Michael Cunningham Jim Grimsley Stephen McCauley Colm Toibin Paul Russell Peter Cameron Matthew Stadler Philip Hensher Dale Peck

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Book SynopsisFrom Egyptian cyberpunk to dubbed versions of Shrek in Iran, this book examines the emergence of new forms of culture in circulation and their geopolitical implications.Trade ReviewAfter the American Century offers a fascinating tour of the appropriation and deployment of American popular culture in a globalized, restless Middle East. From cinema and novels to hip-hop and comic books, this wonderfully written and richly observed book presents novel and exciting readings of familiar cultural forms in new political environments. -- Marc Lynch, author of The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East After the American Century is a book of exquisite audacity. Bold in its detailed precision and daring in its imaginative topography of topics, Brian T. Edwards's writing cuts through much noise and nuisance to lay bare what lies ahead. Its arguments do not just dismantle the imperial fantasy of an 'American century,' but point to the uncharted worlds far beyond its captured imagination. -- Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University This book is a rich account of what happens when cultural objects, literary texts, and films circulate between the Middle East and the United States: how they are interpreted and reinvented, in the process engendering new publics and counterpublics. A nuanced analysis of cultural politics that extends our understanding of the forms and limits of Western domination of the Middle East. -- Saba Mahmood, author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject In After the American Century, Edwards has devised subtle, ethnographically informed reading methodologies to explain how anomalous logics of transnational circulation have radically undermined plans for a 'new American century.' The book will fast become indispensable to an understanding of the genealogy of transnational American studies. -- Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and founding director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College Edwards plunges into the cultural lives of Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran to illustrate the demise of one aspect of "the American century": the outsize influence that U.S. popular culture exercised in the Middle East. -- John Waterbury Foreign Affairs Edwards' background and considerable expertise shine... making the book a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the region. Middle East Journal Now that American power is receding across the globe it is a good time to ask how... methodologies might adapt to these new circumstances, and what we might name such an academic adaptation. Brian T. Edwards' important new book... provides us with a possible answer to this arguably urgent question. Post45 Ambitious, wide-ranging, and highly valuable. European Journal of American Culture Edwards challenges traditional narratives of US cultural imperialism... Highly recommended. CHOICE Edwards is to be commended for his ethnographic methods, his command of local languages, and the originality of his archive. International Journal of Middle East Studies A genuinely important contribution to our understanding of how American literary studies circulates internationally in the twenty-first century. American Literature A welcome work, valuable for its rich readings of unfamiliar yet important Middle Eastern artists and for its stimulating arguments about the transnational circulation of American culture in our global, digital age. Journal of American HistoryTable of ContentsPreface 1. After the American Century: Ends of Circulation 2. Jumping Publics: Egyptian Fictions of the Digital Age 3. "Argo Fuck Yourself": Iranian Cinema and the Curious Logics of Circulation 4. Coming Out in Casablanca: Shrek, Sex, and the Teen Pic in Contemporary Morocco Epilogue: Embracing Orientalism in the Homeland Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisFrom Egyptian cyberpunk to dubbed versions of Shrek in Iran, this book examines the emergence of new forms of culture in circulation and their geopolitical implications.Trade ReviewAfter the American Century offers a fascinating tour of the appropriation and deployment of American popular culture in a globalized, restless Middle East. From cinema and novels to hip-hop and comic books, this wonderfully written and richly observed book presents novel and exciting readings of familiar cultural forms in new political environments. -- Marc Lynch, author of The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East After the American Century is a book of exquisite audacity. Bold in its detailed precision and daring in its imaginative topography of topics, Brian T. Edwards's writing cuts through much noise and nuisance to lay bare what lies ahead. Its arguments do not just dismantle the imperial fantasy of an 'American century,' but point to the uncharted worlds far beyond its captured imagination. -- Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University This book is a rich account of what happens when cultural objects, literary texts, and films circulate between the Middle East and the United States: how they are interpreted and reinvented, in the process engendering new publics and counterpublics. A nuanced analysis of cultural politics that extends our understanding of the forms and limits of Western domination of the Middle East. -- Saba Mahmood, author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject In After the American Century, Edwards has devised subtle, ethnographically informed reading methodologies to explain how anomalous logics of transnational circulation have radically undermined plans for a 'new American century.' The book will fast become indispensable to an understanding of the genealogy of transnational American studies. -- Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and founding director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College Edwards plunges into the cultural lives of Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran to illustrate the demise of one aspect of "the American century": the outsize influence that U.S. popular culture exercised in the Middle East. -- John Waterbury Foreign Affairs Edwards' background and considerable expertise shine... making the book a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the region. Middle East Journal Now that American power is receding across the globe it is a good time to ask how... methodologies might adapt to these new circumstances, and what we might name such an academic adaptation. Brian T. Edwards' important new book... provides us with a possible answer to this arguably urgent question. Post45 Ambitious, wide-ranging, and highly valuable. European Journal of American Culture Edwards challenges traditional narratives of US cultural imperialism... Highly recommended. CHOICE Edwards is to be commended for his ethnographic methods, his command of local languages, and the originality of his archive. International Journal of Middle East Studies A genuinely important contribution to our understanding of how American literary studies circulates internationally in the twenty-first century. American Literature A welcome work, valuable for its rich readings of unfamiliar yet important Middle Eastern artists and for its stimulating arguments about the transnational circulation of American culture in our global, digital age. Journal of American HistoryTable of ContentsPreface 1. After the American Century: Ends of Circulation 2. Jumping Publics: Egyptian Fictions of the Digital Age 3. "Argo Fuck Yourself": Iranian Cinema and the Curious Logics of Circulation 4. Coming Out in Casablanca: Shrek, Sex, and the Teen Pic in Contemporary Morocco Epilogue: Embracing Orientalism in the Homeland Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIslamophobia and the Novel analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice alongside changing concepts of cultural difference. Peter Morey offers readings of novels that show how their portrayal of difference both reflects and refutes the ideological preoccupations of the post-9/11 West.Trade ReviewWith his characteristic brilliance and integrity, Peter Morey, a noted public intellectual, illustrates the impact of surging Islamophobia on mainstream literature in this masterful study. A man whose career has centered on building bridges between divided cultures, his is a voice to heed in these confusing and troubled times. -- Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American UniversityIn a series of brilliantly astute and subtle readings, Peter Morey shows us how the contemporary novel has the capacity to expose the rifts and contradictions in Islamophobic discourses, thereby unsettling conventional frames for seeing Islam and Muslims. Paving the way for what Morey calls a ‘critical Muslim literary studies’, Islamophobia and the Novel is a work of outstanding scholarship, a vital book for the times we live in. -- Rehana Ahmed, Queen Mary University of LondonIf you’ve ever wondered why Muslim characters always seem so poorly imagined in so much contemporary fiction in English, Peter Morey has the answers for you. Islamophobia and the Novel is not only a lucid account of how Muslim characters get stuck in a spider’s web of representation. It is also a handbook for how to break free. -- Moustafa Bayoumi, Brooklyn CollegeA persuasive, theoretically grounded analysis of the state of literary novels in English dealing with the Muslim world and the West’s responses to (and uses of) Islamophobia. * Choice *Morey builds to that key conclusion with clarity. Understanding where literature stands in relation to Islamophobia is an initial and important step toward diminishing it. * Modern Philology *Strenuously researched and convincing...Islamophobia and the Novel invites us to understand the disquieting truths how Islamophobia is disseminated through discourse of representation, and how contemporary fiction has contributed to it. Morey’s remarkable research and his unbiased literary judgements push us to think afresh. * Wasafiri *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction—Islamophobia: The Word and the World1. Islam, Culture, and Anarchy: Faith, Doubt, and Liberalism in Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and John Updike2. From Multiculturalism to Islamophobia: Identity Politics and Individualism in Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali3. Muslim Misery Memoirs: The Truth Claims of Exotic Suffering in Azar Nafisi and Khaled Hosseini4. Migrant Cartographies: Islamophobia and the Politics of the City Space in Amy Waldman and H. M. Naqvi5. States of Statelessness: Islamophobia and Border Spaces in the Post-9/11 Thrillers of John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan6. Islamophobia and the Global Novel: “Worlding” History in Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie7. Marketing the Muslim: Globalization and the Postsecular in Mohsin Hamid and Leila AboulelaConclusion—Toward a Critical Muslim Literary StudiesNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHeather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in the age of climate crisis and informational overload. She argues that the infowhelm—a state of abundant yet contested scientific information—is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises.Trade ReviewInfowhelm offers a terrific and timely interdisciplinary method, bridging environmental and digital humanities. Houser asks deep, consequential questions about how data comes to matter, and more specifically how the arts (across media) can bring the data of climate change into affective presence, individual action, and community conversation. -- Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of OregonIn prose that eschews jargon, Houser calls for a détente between science/technology and humanistic and narrative ways of understanding the world. She shows how data and science narratives interweave with literature, visual arts, and media arts to create new modes of thinking about the world that depend as much on feeling as ratiocination. Along the way she discusses "entangled epistemologies of the Infowhelm": how the arts help us to visualize hyperobjects and massive shifts in environment that seem beyond our understanding when couched only in scientific data. This book is a polished and mature work of scholarship that adds wonderful new ideas to the discussion of how science and the arts mutually influence one another. -- Amy J. Elias, author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s FictionAmidst the swirl of data and other forms of information about the environment that saturate the contemporary world, Heather Houser finds a refuge of sorts in the work of artists who, making art of “scientific information,” help us make sense of it. In this remarkably creative and entrancing work, she shows how an aesthetic engagement with this information exposes the nature of the knowledge it produces not to reject it, but to allow for a profound grappling with it. With her magnificent prose and elegant analyses, Houser conveys the pleasure as well as the insights these artistic experiments produce, as we work to make sense of the “infowhelm” of the contemporary moment. This book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced that phenomenon, which is to say for us all. -- Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak NarrativeIt would be nice if the accumulated ill effects of the positivist scientific mindset on the natural environment could be cancelled out by a simple turn to more innocent modes of thought. Heather Houser models an approach to the intertwined problems of quantification, scientific representation, and ecological consciousness at once more realistic and more imaginative than that. Assembling a fascinating constellation of artworks that conjure the perplexities of the contemporary informational condition in exciting new ways, she makes a strong case for rethinking the relation between aesthetic experience and epistemology from the ground up. This book will be of interest to a vast range of scholars working on contemporary culture and the environmental humanities. -- Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative WritingHouser uncovers how artists alchemize scientific information into aesthetic material in contemporary environmental art. Her writing method reveals that wonder is the essence of inquiry . . . [Infowhelm’s] synthesis of multiple artistic—literary and visual—works not only offers new ways of seeing environmental change, but also challenges traditional types of knowledge. * Orion Magazine *An ambitious and dazzling scholarly work . . . Infowhelm pushes environmental humanities scholarship forward by leaps and bounds. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *A virtuosic reappraisal of art and information, during our era of ecological catastrophe . . . Infowhelm is ambitious, timely, and dynamic. It should take its place alongside the most consequential recent studies in ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and contemporary literature. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Environmental Art in the InfowhelmPart I. Cultural Climate KnowledgePreface1. Making Data Experiential2. Coming-of- Mind in Climate NarrativesPart II. The New Natural HistoryPreface3. Classifictions4. Visualizing Loss for a “Fragmented Survival”Part III. Aerial EnvironmentalismsPreface5. Environmental Aftermaths from the Sky6. The Afterlives of Information in Speculative FictionEpilogue: Can Thinking Make It So?AcknowledgmentsNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisHeather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in the age of climate crisis and informational overload. She argues that the infowhelm—a state of abundant yet contested scientific information—is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises.Trade ReviewInfowhelm offers a terrific and timely interdisciplinary method, bridging environmental and digital humanities. Houser asks deep, consequential questions about how data comes to matter, and more specifically how the arts (across media) can bring the data of climate change into affective presence, individual action, and community conversation. -- Stephanie LeMenager, Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of OregonIn prose that eschews jargon, Houser calls for a détente between science/technology and humanistic and narrative ways of understanding the world. She shows how data and science narratives interweave with literature, visual arts, and media arts to create new modes of thinking about the world that depend as much on feeling as ratiocination. Along the way she discusses "entangled epistemologies of the Infowhelm": how the arts help us to visualize hyperobjects and massive shifts in environment that seem beyond our understanding when couched only in scientific data. This book is a polished and mature work of scholarship that adds wonderful new ideas to the discussion of how science and the arts mutually influence one another. -- Amy J. Elias, author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s FictionAmidst the swirl of data and other forms of information about the environment that saturate the contemporary world, Heather Houser finds a refuge of sorts in the work of artists who, making art of “scientific information,” help us make sense of it. In this remarkably creative and entrancing work, she shows how an aesthetic engagement with this information exposes the nature of the knowledge it produces not to reject it, but to allow for a profound grappling with it. With her magnificent prose and elegant analyses, Houser conveys the pleasure as well as the insights these artistic experiments produce, as we work to make sense of the “infowhelm” of the contemporary moment. This book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced that phenomenon, which is to say for us all. -- Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak NarrativeIt would be nice if the accumulated ill effects of the positivist scientific mindset on the natural environment could be cancelled out by a simple turn to more innocent modes of thought. Heather Houser models an approach to the intertwined problems of quantification, scientific representation, and ecological consciousness at once more realistic and more imaginative than that. Assembling a fascinating constellation of artworks that conjure the perplexities of the contemporary informational condition in exciting new ways, she makes a strong case for rethinking the relation between aesthetic experience and epistemology from the ground up. This book will be of interest to a vast range of scholars working on contemporary culture and the environmental humanities. -- Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative WritingHouser uncovers how artists alchemize scientific information into aesthetic material in contemporary environmental art. Her writing method reveals that wonder is the essence of inquiry . . . [Infowhelm’s] synthesis of multiple artistic—literary and visual—works not only offers new ways of seeing environmental change, but also challenges traditional types of knowledge. * Orion Magazine *An ambitious and dazzling scholarly work . . . Infowhelm pushes environmental humanities scholarship forward by leaps and bounds. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *A virtuosic reappraisal of art and information, during our era of ecological catastrophe . . . Infowhelm is ambitious, timely, and dynamic. It should take its place alongside the most consequential recent studies in ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and contemporary literature. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Environmental Art in the InfowhelmPart I. Cultural Climate KnowledgePreface1. Making Data Experiential2. Coming-of- Mind in Climate NarrativesPart II. The New Natural HistoryPreface3. Classifictions4. Visualizing Loss for a “Fragmented Survival”Part III. Aerial EnvironmentalismsPreface5. Environmental Aftermaths from the Sky6. The Afterlives of Information in Speculative FictionEpilogue: Can Thinking Make It So?AcknowledgmentsNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisJacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, and other forms of repetition.Trade ReviewMake It the Same rebuts the notion that formal word-games are a decadent first-world hobby. It is an empirically broad, thoughtfully constructed, well-written, timely book about an important subject: a technical "mode of production" prominent in contemporary poetry, with its effects on content and reception. -- Haun Saussy, author of The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its TechnologiesMake It the Same offers a global perspective on cultural iteration, triangulating English-language poetry with Russian and Chinese practices. Edmond immediately underscores the unintended irony with which those in the United States speak of "the poetry world" to mean precisely the opposite of the global: a micro, naval-gazing echo chamber. Given how parochial literary communities around a genre can be, this is an especially important contribution to literary studies. -- Craig Dworkin, author of No MediumWith its revisionist echoes of Pound’s ‘make it new,’ Make It the Same is theoretically generative for thinking about modernist, contemporary, and world literature. Edmond powerfully demonstrates how the new media of repetition have generated a poetics of the same, a ‘copy poetry’ that remixes prior poetries in global trajectories outside Eurocentric, center/periphery literary studies. A path-breaking book for post-1950s literature! -- Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-MadisonA radical contribution to poetry studies. . . . Make It the Same should be celebrated not only for what the book does well—its subtle analyses of poems, its detailed knowledge of technology, its easy movement between English, Chinese, and Russian—but also for what it makes possible for scholars of poetry to do next. -- Walt Hunter * Los Angeles Review of Books *The flexibility of [Edmond’s] approach, his uncanny ability to extend the meanings of writing and reading, and his willingness to participate in the numerous digital frontier forms that poets in recent decades have sought to explore bear rich fruit. . . . Only a supremely creative and passionate scholarly approach could have yielded such a timely vision. -- Martin Dyar * Times Higher Education *Make It the Same is lucidly written and meticulously researched....[and] establishes the terms for a vital reappraisal of cultural production in our present age. As such, it will be of close interest to scholars of contemporary literature and cultural studies, comparative and world literature, media studies, and the cultural history of information. * Modernism/Modernity *A breakthrough work of analysis, drawing from a range of critical fields to substantiate its case for the copy as a dominant global cultural form. It is a measure of Edmond’s contribution that Make It the Same will be required reading across the fields of modernist studies, contemporary historical poetics, and world literature, and a salient model for future transnational literary studies. * Review of English Studies *An important, fascinating and timely discussion of poetry of the iterative turn. * Landfall *A fascinating look at what poetry is becoming in the 21st century: it is subversive and regenerating like the tendrils of an octopus, always alive and seeking more ideas. * Choice *Make It the Same shows the author’s globe-spanning grasp of emergent and established poetries, understanding of a combination of theoretical persuasions, and persuasive deployment of a range of interpretive methods. * Cha *Edmond’s Make It the Same offers a significant rewriting of world literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, raising a series of important questions about language, form, circulation, and comparativity that will no doubt prove enabling for future scholarship. -- Sarah Dowling * Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *Edmond’s engaging and exciting book merits a wide readership by scholarsand students across literary and cultural studies. Innovative, thoroughly researched,and well-argued, this book is a remarkable study. * Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews *Students and scholars of literary conceptualism, experimental translation, cross-cultural collaboration, multilingualism, performance writing, visual poetry, artistic plagiarism, and digital poetics among other nonnormative modes of poiesis are bound to benefit from Edmond’s rich contextualizations and his method of what we might call “comparative iterature.” * Contemporary Literature *Edmond makes a compelling case for the contemporary avant-garde as a counterweight to more mainstream codex-based poetics that often privilege notions of original authorship. * Journal of Modern Periodical Studies *A new moment in poetry criticism, one in which studies of form refigure the archive, undoing longstanding divisions between experimentation and expression. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Copy as Global Master Trope1. Postcolonial Media: Kamau Brathwaite’s Reel Revolution2. The Art of Samizdat: Dmitri Prigov, Moscow Conceptualism, and the Carbon-Copy Origins of New Media Poetics3. Making Waves in World Literature: Yang Lian and John Cayley’s Networked Collaboration4. Shibboleth: The Border Crossings of Caroline Bergvall, Performance Writing, and Iterative Poetics5. Copy Rights: Conceptual Writing, the Mongrel Coalition, and the Racial Politics of Digital Media6. Chinese Rooms: The Work of Poetry in an Age of Global Languages, Machine Translation, and Automatic EstrangementRecapitulations: Repetition and Revolution in World PoetryNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisJacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, and other forms of repetition.Trade ReviewMake It the Same rebuts the notion that formal word-games are a decadent first-world hobby. It is an empirically broad, thoughtfully constructed, well-written, timely book about an important subject: a technical "mode of production" prominent in contemporary poetry, with its effects on content and reception. -- Haun Saussy, author of The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its TechnologiesMake It the Same offers a global perspective on cultural iteration, triangulating English-language poetry with Russian and Chinese practices. Edmond immediately underscores the unintended irony with which those in the United States speak of "the poetry world" to mean precisely the opposite of the global: a micro, naval-gazing echo chamber. Given how parochial literary communities around a genre can be, this is an especially important contribution to literary studies. -- Craig Dworkin, author of No MediumWith its revisionist echoes of Pound’s ‘make it new,’ Make It the Same is theoretically generative for thinking about modernist, contemporary, and world literature. Edmond powerfully demonstrates how the new media of repetition have generated a poetics of the same, a ‘copy poetry’ that remixes prior poetries in global trajectories outside Eurocentric, center/periphery literary studies. A path-breaking book for post-1950s literature! -- Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-MadisonA radical contribution to poetry studies. . . . Make It the Same should be celebrated not only for what the book does well—its subtle analyses of poems, its detailed knowledge of technology, its easy movement between English, Chinese, and Russian—but also for what it makes possible for scholars of poetry to do next. -- Walt Hunter * Los Angeles Review of Books *The flexibility of [Edmond’s] approach, his uncanny ability to extend the meanings of writing and reading, and his willingness to participate in the numerous digital frontier forms that poets in recent decades have sought to explore bear rich fruit. . . . Only a supremely creative and passionate scholarly approach could have yielded such a timely vision. -- Martin Dyar * Times Higher Education *Make It the Same is lucidly written and meticulously researched....[and] establishes the terms for a vital reappraisal of cultural production in our present age. As such, it will be of close interest to scholars of contemporary literature and cultural studies, comparative and world literature, media studies, and the cultural history of information. * Modernism/Modernity *A breakthrough work of analysis, drawing from a range of critical fields to substantiate its case for the copy as a dominant global cultural form. It is a measure of Edmond’s contribution that Make It the Same will be required reading across the fields of modernist studies, contemporary historical poetics, and world literature, and a salient model for future transnational literary studies. * Review of English Studies *An important, fascinating and timely discussion of poetry of the iterative turn. * Landfall *A fascinating look at what poetry is becoming in the 21st century: it is subversive and regenerating like the tendrils of an octopus, always alive and seeking more ideas. * Choice *Make It the Same shows the author’s globe-spanning grasp of emergent and established poetries, understanding of a combination of theoretical persuasions, and persuasive deployment of a range of interpretive methods. * Cha *Edmond’s Make It the Same offers a significant rewriting of world literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, raising a series of important questions about language, form, circulation, and comparativity that will no doubt prove enabling for future scholarship. -- Sarah Dowling * Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *Edmond’s engaging and exciting book merits a wide readership by scholarsand students across literary and cultural studies. Innovative, thoroughly researched,and well-argued, this book is a remarkable study. * Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews *Students and scholars of literary conceptualism, experimental translation, cross-cultural collaboration, multilingualism, performance writing, visual poetry, artistic plagiarism, and digital poetics among other nonnormative modes of poiesis are bound to benefit from Edmond’s rich contextualizations and his method of what we might call “comparative iterature.” * Contemporary Literature *Edmond makes a compelling case for the contemporary avant-garde as a counterweight to more mainstream codex-based poetics that often privilege notions of original authorship. * Journal of Modern Periodical Studies *A new moment in poetry criticism, one in which studies of form refigure the archive, undoing longstanding divisions between experimentation and expression. * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Copy as Global Master Trope1. Postcolonial Media: Kamau Brathwaite’s Reel Revolution2. The Art of Samizdat: Dmitri Prigov, Moscow Conceptualism, and the Carbon-Copy Origins of New Media Poetics3. Making Waves in World Literature: Yang Lian and John Cayley’s Networked Collaboration4. Shibboleth: The Border Crossings of Caroline Bergvall, Performance Writing, and Iterative Poetics5. Copy Rights: Conceptual Writing, the Mongrel Coalition, and the Racial Politics of Digital Media6. Chinese Rooms: The Work of Poetry in an Age of Global Languages, Machine Translation, and Automatic EstrangementRecapitulations: Repetition and Revolution in World PoetryNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHart's eight collection of poems, Barefoot draws on Christianity and the rich heritage of American Blues, creating a blend of religious poetry and love poetry.Trade Review“Kevin Hart’s Barefoot is a magnificent book. Hart’s poetry has always been marked by a tenderness and sensuality and an openness to existence, and it remains so here, but that openness now extends to the negative aspects of existence, which make the book both exhilarating and harrowing. I think that Barefoot is one of Kevin Hart’s finest achievements.” —John Koethe, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee“One of the finest poets now writing in English, Kevin Hart beautifully and indelibly surveys the human position—not only our body-life in time, but also our apprehensions of what lies beyond us. The title of his marvelous new collection, Barefoot, perfectly expresses its openness, freedom, power, and delight.” —David Mason, author of The Sound: New and Selected Poems“One of the strengths of this book is Hart’s penetrating lucidity and his passionate ideas. He is a master craftsman with a visionary imagination and these are his finest poems.” —Robert Adamson, CAL Chair in Poetry, University of Technology Sydney"When I read Kevin Hart, I feel less alone, which is to say that I feel that someone understands my own desire to be alone. I feel a companion spirit, out there wandering barefoot in the darkness, looking for God. But this does not mean that the experience is entirely comforting; this is not some faux-poetry of greeting-card consolation." —Marginalia, Los Angeles Review of Books"In Kevin Hart’s eighth book of poetry, he uses poetry to talk to the absent or, rather, the ambiguously present: his late father, God, past lovers, and versions of himself. . . . Like many mystics before him, Hart often speaks of the divine in erotic terms." —World Literature Today“Kevin Hart’s Christianity is ever present even as he writes passionately of young love, titillation, and ‘thin girls who taste of Beaujolais at night.’ That he is comfortable with grief, mystery, solemnity, biblical and classical history, and humility instills his work with rare depth.” —Foreword Reviews

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Book SynopsisThe essential companion for lovers of the contemporary novelTrade Review“Altogether, a stimulating and useful enterprise.”—Kevin Power, Irish Times“It is very possible that Peter Kemp is the best-read man in Britain.” —Ian Sansom, The Spectator“Peter Kemp has held the torch for fiction over many years—scrupulous, devoted to his favourite authors, and insightful about emerging talent.”—Edna O’Brien“An exhilarating gallop across the landscape of recent English-language fiction. You may not share all of Peter Kemp’s trans-genre enthusiasms, but you will certainly be awed by his omnivorous appetite and will come away with at least a dozen books you are now itching to read.”—Sebastian Faulks“Readable and enjoyable as well as informative. The sort of book that keen novel readers should buy and praise.”—Lindsay Duguid“No one knows more about fiction over the last 50 years than Peter Kemp. He has been a fearless and fiercely knowledgeable and entertaining critic for decades, and in this fascinating book he offers a completely original take on the modern novel—one that will completely change how we think about what we all have been reading.”—Andrew Holgate“A rich, vivid, and endlessly informative book, with an awe-inspiring command of detail.”—Leo Robson

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Book SynopsisTranscending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa MarÃa RodrÃguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English. Trade Review"This book stands out as an unyielding and timely repositioning of paradigms in the domains of philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism and cultural theory through the lens of contemporary literature in English…the ten chapters of the book succeed in producing a close view of how themes such as postcolonialism, subalternity, eco-criticism, feminist criticism, etc. fall into the transmodern pattern." Sorin Cazacu, University of Craiova, British and American StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Transcending the PostmodernSusana Onega and Jean-Michel GanteauPART IThe Poetics of Transmodernity The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality Susana Onega Transnational Latino/a Literature and the Transmodern Meta-Narrative: An Alternative Reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Sara Villamarín-Freire The Novel of Ideas at the Crossroads of Transmodernity: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island Angelo Monaco PART II Ethical Perceptions Problematising the Transmodern: Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration Jean-Michel Ganteau Using Transculturalism to Understand the Transmodern Paradigm: Representations of Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Matthias Stephan Transmodern Mythopoesis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant Laura Colombino PART III Migrancy and the Possibility of Re-enchantment A Transmodern Approach to Post-9/11 Australia: Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist as a Narrative of the Limit Bárbara Arizti Diversity, Singularity, Re-Enchantment and Relationality in a Transmodern World: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Merve Sarıkaya-Şen PART IV Perspectives on Biopolitics Transcorporeality, Fluidity and Transanimality in Monique Roffey’s Novel Archipelago Julia Kuznetski A Transmodern Approach to Biology in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen

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Book SynopsisForegrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage.Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Critical Visions Penny Farfan I. Replaying the Canon 1. Feminist Adaptations / Adaptations of Feminism: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad Penny Farfan 2. Indigenizing the Colonial Narrative: Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife Denise Varney 3. Does Revenge Fall Softly? YaËl Farber’s Molora Catherine Cole 4. Indecent Collaborations and / in Queer Time(s) Katie N. Johnson and Sara L. Warner II. Representing Histories 5. The Bloodstained Distance: Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box Alisa Solomon 6. Unmaking a Devil’s Bargain: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home from the Wars and the Idea of America Soyica Diggs Colbert and Robert J. Patterson 7. “A Change Is Gonna Come?” Protest and Racial Progress in debbie tucker green’s ear for eye Lynette Goddard 8. Maternal Agency and Reproductive Justice in Lisa Loomer’s Roe Sharon L. Green III. Staging Lives 9. The Mythic Migrant, the Witnessing Self: HÉlÈne Cixous and Le Dernier CaravansÉrail: OdyssÉes Emine Fisek 10. Exceptional Embodiment in Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy Ryan Claycomb 11. Acting and Reenacting the Malvinas/Falklands War in Lola Arias’s Minefield/Campo minado Paola S. HernÁndez 12. Fun Home: Lesbian Feminism Meets Broadway Musical Theatre Stacy Wolf IV. Re-imagining Family 13. A ‘rock inside the flesh’: Motherwork in Marie Clements’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women Karen Bamford and Sheila Rabillard 14. Quiara Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful and the Dramaturgy of Free Jazz Natalie Alvarez and Jimena Ortuzar 15. British Muslim Feminism and the Marriage Trap: Alia Bano’s Shades Meenakshi Ponnuswami 16. Lesbian Interspecies Performance: Holly Hughes’s The Dog and Pony Show (bring your own pony) Kim Marra V. Navigating Communities 17. Bread of Life: Whiti Hereaka’s Rewena Diana Looser 18. Transcultural Memory and Food in Julia Cho’s Aubergine Esther Kim Lee 19. Truth and Absurdity on the London Stage: Liwaa Yazji’s Goats and its Audiences Margaret Litvin with Liwaa Yazji 20. “I Will Tend Your Garden”: The Terms of Proximity in Grace PassÔ’s Por Elise Honey Crawford VI. Articulating Intersections 21. Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root: Intersectionality and the Jena Six Juliet Guzzetta 22. Economic Disenfranchisement and Gender Inequality in Emma Dante’s mPalermu Francesca Spedalieri 23. The Magic of Change: Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s The World of Extreme Happiness Xing Fan 24. “But nostalgia’s a disease”: Viewing Lynn Nottage’s Sweat in the Age of Trump Courtney Elkin Mohler VII. New World Order(s) 25. Miss Piggy the Seer in the Land of Trump’s Blind: Elfriede Jelinek’s On the Royal Road: The Burgher King Sue-Ellen Case 26. Has She “Escaped Alone” to Tell Us? Caryl Churchill: ‘Messenger’ for the Twenty-First Century Rosemary Malague 27. Climate Change and the Capitalocene in Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole Wendy Arons 28. The Ghosts of Greenham Common in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children Lesley Ferris Afterwords: Emerging Currents: Fighting on Two Fronts Lesley Ferris Notes on Contributors

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Book SynopsisForegrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage.Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Critical Visions Penny Farfan I. Replaying the Canon 1. Feminist Adaptations / Adaptations of Feminism: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad Penny Farfan 2. Indigenizing the Colonial Narrative: Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife Denise Varney 3. Does Revenge Fall Softly? YaËl Farber’s Molora Catherine Cole 4. Indecent Collaborations and / in Queer Time(s) Katie N. Johnson and Sara L. Warner II. Representing Histories 5. The Bloodstained Distance: Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box Alisa Solomon 6. Unmaking a Devil’s Bargain: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home from the Wars and the Idea of America Soyica Diggs Colbert and Robert J. Patterson 7. “A Change Is Gonna Come?” Protest and Racial Progress in debbie tucker green’s ear for eye Lynette Goddard 8. Maternal Agency and Reproductive Justice in Lisa Loomer’s Roe Sharon L. Green III. Staging Lives 9. The Mythic Migrant, the Witnessing Self: HÉlÈne Cixous and Le Dernier CaravansÉrail: OdyssÉes Emine Fisek 10. Exceptional Embodiment in Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy Ryan Claycomb 11. Acting and Reenacting the Malvinas/Falklands War in Lola Arias’s Minefield/Campo minado Paola S. HernÁndez 12. Fun Home: Lesbian Feminism Meets Broadway Musical Theatre Stacy Wolf IV. Re-imagining Family 13. A ‘rock inside the flesh’: Motherwork in Marie Clements’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women Karen Bamford and Sheila Rabillard 14. Quiara Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful and the Dramaturgy of Free Jazz Natalie Alvarez and Jimena Ortuzar 15. British Muslim Feminism and the Marriage Trap: Alia Bano’s Shades Meenakshi Ponnuswami 16. Lesbian Interspecies Performance: Holly Hughes’s The Dog and Pony Show (bring your own pony) Kim Marra V. Navigating Communities 17. Bread of Life: Whiti Hereaka’s Rewena Diana Looser 18. Transcultural Memory and Food in Julia Cho’s Aubergine Esther Kim Lee 19. Truth and Absurdity on the London Stage: Liwaa Yazji’s Goats and its Audiences Margaret Litvin with Liwaa Yazji 20. “I Will Tend Your Garden”: The Terms of Proximity in Grace PassÔ’s Por Elise Honey Crawford VI. Articulating Intersections 21. Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root: Intersectionality and the Jena Six Juliet Guzzetta 22. Economic Disenfranchisement and Gender Inequality in Emma Dante’s mPalermu Francesca Spedalieri 23. The Magic of Change: Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s The World of Extreme Happiness Xing Fan 24. “But nostalgia’s a disease”: Viewing Lynn Nottage’s Sweat in the Age of Trump Courtney Elkin Mohler VII. New World Order(s) 25. Miss Piggy the Seer in the Land of Trump’s Blind: Elfriede Jelinek’s On the Royal Road: The Burgher King Sue-Ellen Case 26. Has She “Escaped Alone” to Tell Us? Caryl Churchill: ‘Messenger’ for the Twenty-First Century Rosemary Malague 27. Climate Change and the Capitalocene in Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole Wendy Arons 28. The Ghosts of Greenham Common in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children Lesley Ferris Afterwords: Emerging Currents: Fighting on Two Fronts Lesley Ferris Notes on Contributors

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Book SynopsisAvant-Garde Post– follows seven Russophone poets as they reinvigorate leftist art in the wake of state socialism. Rejecting both the Putin regime—with its selective mobilizations of Soviet nostalgia—and Western discourses of liberal superiority, this circle is reviving class-based critique through experimental forms and global collaborations.Trade ReviewMarijeta Bozovic has written the definitive study of avant-garde poetry’s role in the leftist resistance movement that has long stood opposed to the Putin regime. Her command of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and politics is extraordinary. -- Marjorie Perloff, author of Infrathin: An Experiment in MicropoeticsAn informative introduction to two recent generations of aesthetically inventive Russian-language poets, whose works embrace both a politics of resistance to authoritarianism and agitation for social and economic liberation. Writing in the wake of Dragomoshchenko and Prigov, the radical poets at the center of this book are brilliant and necessary voices, who we need to hear all the more in this time of crisis for Russian culture. -- Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of PoetryBrilliant and essential. With dazzling insights and vibrant, compelling prose, Bozovic captures the political-aesthetic energy, urgency, and vitality of post-Soviet radical poetics. Her account is at once a literary history of this new movement, a portrait of seven major poets, and a theorization of a new tendency in Russian poetics. It is not only the most important book on post-Soviet poetry, but also the best book I have read on post-Soviet Russia as such. At the same time, it makes a crucial contribution to broader debates about the possibilities for transformative, leftist art across the world. -- Jonathan Flatley, author of Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of ModernismAvant-Garde Post– is an incisive study of the most intriguing leftist poets working in and around Russia today. Informed by years of research in close contact and partnership with the authors themselves, Bozovic’s work explains how they have renovated traditions of engaged, experimental, and revolutionary culture for a new era. Her examination of these figures, who have worked in opposition to the Putin regime for decades, could not be more timely. -- Kevin M. F. Platt, author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive introduction to British fiction from 1979 to the present. The volume outlines the main developments in contemporary fiction and engages with key themes such as cultural identity, gender, myth and history, postcolonialism and urban culture.Trade Review"[An] insightful, perceptive and nuanced analysis ... the collection is a landmark in the critical analysis of current literary culture." Times Higher Education Supplement "I was impressed by the range and conscientious skill of the critics... this collection discusses much of the best in contemporary British writing, and deserves to be successful." Sir Frank Kermode, formerly King Edward Professor of English at Cambridge "An admirably ambitious attempt to map the contemporary literary scene, impressive both in the range and the depth of its coverage. Certainly the sharpest and most up-to-date book I have read on the subject." Jonathan CoeTable of ContentsNotes on Contributors. General Introduction: Contemporary British Fiction. (Rod Mengham). Part I: Myth and History. Introduction. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). 1. Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy . (John Brannigan). 2. The Fiction of Jim Crace. (Richard J. Lane). 3. The Novels of Graham Swift. (Tamas Benyei). 4. The Fiction of Iain Sinclair. (Rod Mengham). Part II: Urban Thematics. Introduction. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). 5. The Fiction of Will Self. (Liorah Anne Golomb). 6. Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia. (Anthony Ilona). 7. Zadie Smith's White Teeth. (Dominic Head). 8. The Fiction of A. L. Kennedy. (Philip Tew). Part III: Cultural Hybridity. Introduction. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). 9. Salman Rushdie. (Stephen Baker). 10. The Fiction of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh. (Drew Milne). 11. Caryl Phillips. (Brad Buchanan). Part IV: Pathological Subjects. Introduction. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). 12. The Fiction of Angela Carter. (Robert Eaglestone). 13. Jeanette Winterson's Evolving Subject. (Kim Middleton Meyer). 14. Kazuo Ishiguro and the Work of Art. (Mark Wormald). 15. The Fiction of Martin Amis. (James Diedrick). Glossary of Major Theoretical Sources. (Richard J. Lane and Philip Tew). Index.

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Book SynopsisA study of Darwin's Legacy for relegion, ecology and the arts. It argues that poetry can have a profound impact on how we think and feel about the human condition in a Darwinian world. It includes over 50 complete poems and substantial extracts from several more, Holmes shows how poets have responded to the discovery of evolution.Table of ContentsA. R. Ammons: 'Questionable Procedures'; Philip Appleman: 'How Evolution Came to Indiana', 'Waldorf-Astoria Euphoria'; D. M. Black: 'Kew Gardens'; Mathilde Blind: The Ascent of Man [extracts]; Robert Browning: 'Caliban upon Setebos' [extracts]; William Canton: 'The Latter Law' [sonnet from a sequence]; Stephen Crane: 'A man said to the universe'; Richard Eberhart: 'Sea-Hawk'; Robert Frost: 'Design', 'The Oven Bird', 'The Most of It', 'Our Hold on the Planet'; Thom Gunn: 'Adultery', 'The Garden of the Gods'; Thomas Hardy: 'Hap', 'Your Last Drive', 'Rain on a Grave', 'At Castle Boterel', 'An August Midnight', 'The Darkling Thrush', 'Shelley's Skylark', 'The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House', 'To Outer Nature', 'On a Fine Morning'; Robinson Jeffers: 'Vulture', Cawdor [extract], 'Rock and Hawk'; George Meredith: 'The Woods of Westermain' [opening lyric], 'In the Woods' [8 lyrics out of a sequence of 9], 'The Lark Ascending' [extracts], Modern Love [3 sonnets from a sequence], 'Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn' [extracts]; Edna St Vincent Millay: 'The Fawn', 'I shall forget you presently, my dear', Fatal Interview [2 sonnets from a sequence]; Edwin Morgan: 'Eohippus', 'The Archaeopteryx's Song', 'Trilobites'; Lewis Morris: 'Ode of Creation' [extract]; Constance Naden: 'Natural Selection'; Agnes Mary Robinson: 'Darwinism'; Pattiann Rogers: 'Against the Ethereal', 'The Possible Suffering of a God During Creation', 'Geocentric'; Neil Rollinson: 'My Father Shaving Charles Darwin'; John Addington Symonds: 'An Old Gordian Knot' [sonnet from a sequence]; Alfred Tennyson: 'Flower in the Crannied Wall', 'By an Evolutionist', 'The Dawn', 'The Making of Man', 'Frater Ave atque Vale', 'Lucretius' [extracts].

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