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This book explores the cultural bridges connecting George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Miller,…
to China. Analyzing readings, adaptations, and connections of Shaw in China through the lens of Chinese culture, Li details the negotiations between the focused and culturally specific standpoints of eastern and western culture while also investigating the simultaneously diffused, multi-focal, and comprehensive perspectives that create strategic moments that favor cross-cultural readings. With sources ranging from Shaw's connections with his contemporaries in China to contemporary Chinese films and interpretations of Shaw in the digital space, Li relates the global impact of not only what Chinese lenses can reveal about Shaw's world, but how intercultural and interdisciplinary readings can shed new light on familiar and obscure works alike.Balzac, Literary Sociologist
By Allan H. Pasco. 2016
Melding the fields of literature, sociology, and history, this book develops analyses of the ten novels in Balzac's Sc#65533;nes de…
la vie de province. Following the order of the novels projected in La Com#65533;die humaine, Allan H. Pasco investigates how Balzac used art as a tool of social inquiry to obtain startlingly accurate insights into the relationships that defined his turbulent society. His repeated claim to be an "historian of manners" was more than an empty boast. Though Balzac was first and foremost a great novelist, he was also a trailblazing sociologist, joining Henri de Saint-Simon and the subsequent Auguste Comte in considering the relationships that represent society as an interacting, interlocking web. Using a methodology that combines close analysis with a broad cultural context, Pasco demonstrates that Balzac's sociological vision was extraordinarily pertinent to both his and our days.This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of…
the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture.Tales from Shakespeare
By Graham Holderness. 2005
In this engaging new book, writer and critic Graham Holderness shows how a classic Shakespeare play can be the source…
for a modern story, providing a creative 'collision' between the Shakespeare text and contemporary concerns. Using an analogy from particle physics, Holderness tests his methodology through specific examples, structured in four parts: a recreation of performances of Hamlet and Richard II aboard the East India Company ship the Red Dragon in 1607; an imagined encounter between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson writing the King James Bible; the creation of a contemporary folk hero based on Coriolanus and drawing on films such as Skyfall and The Hurt Locker; and an account of the terrorist bombing at a performance of Twelfth Night in Qatar in 2005. These pieces of narrative and drama are interspersed with literary criticism, each using a feature of the original Shakespeare play or its performance to illuminate the extraordinary elasticity of Shakespeare. The 'tales' provoke questions about what we understand to be Shakespeare and not-Shakespeare, making the book of vital interest to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of Shakespeare, literary criticism and creative writing.Hellenistic and Biblical Greek
By B. H. Mclean. 2014
This Hellenistic Greek reader is designed for students who have completed one or more years of Greek and wish to…
improve their reading ability and gain a better appreciation for the diversity of the language The seventy passages in this reader reflect different styles genres provenances and purposes and are arranged into eight parts according to their level of difficulty Grammatical support and vocabulary lists accompany each passage and a cumulative glossary offers further assistance with translation Students are led to a deeper understanding of Hellenistic Greek and a greater facility with the language Includes canonical and non-canonical Christian texts Septuagint prose and poetry Jewish Pseudepigrapha inscriptions and Jewish and Hellenistic literary Greek Includes a web component with more than thirty additional readings for classroom and independent use Passages offer a glimpse into the everyday life of Hellenistic Greeks with themes such as sexuality slavery magic apocalypticism and Hellenistic philosophyThe Complete Poems of Shakespeare (Longman Annotated English Poets)
By Raphael Lyne, Cathy Shrank. 2018
Although best known for his plays, William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was also a poet who achieved extraordinary depth and…
variety in only a few key works. This edition of his poetry provides detailed notes, commentary and appendices resulting in an academically thorough and equally accessible edition to Shakespeare’s poetry. The editors present his non-dramatic poems in the chronological order of their print publication: the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; the metaphysical ‘Let the Bird of Loudest Lay’ (often known as The Phoenix and the Turtle); all 154 Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. In headnotes and extensive annotations to the texts, Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne elucidate historical contexts, publication histories, and above all the literary and linguistic features of poems whose subtleties always reward careful attention. Substantial appendices trace the sources for Shakespeare’s narrative poems and the controversial text The Passionate Pilgrim, as well as providing information about poems posthumously attributed to him, and the English sonnet sequence. Shrank and Lyne guide readers of all levels with a glossary of rhetorical terms, an index of the poems (titles and first lines), and an account of Shakespeare’s rhymes informed by scholarship on Elizabethan pronunciation. With all these scholarly resources supporting a newly edited, modern-spelling text, this edition combines accessibility with layers of rich information to inform the most sophisticated reading.Poetry as Resistance: Islam and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Pakistan
By Nukhbah Taj Langah. 2012
Focusing on the culturally and historically rich Siraiki-speaking region, often tagged as ‘South Punjab’, this book discusses the ways in…
which Siraiki creative writers have transformed into political activists, resisting the self-imposed domination of the Punjabi–Mohajir ruling elite. Influenced by Sufi poets, their poetry takes the shape of both protest and dialogue. This book reflects upon the politics of identity and the political complications which are a result of colonisation and later, neo-colonisation of Pakistan. It challenges the philosophy of Pakistan — a state created for Muslims — which is now taking the shape of religious fanaticism, while disregarding ethnic and linguistic issues such as that of Siraiki.Frontier Cultures: A Social History of Assamese Literature
By Manjeet Baruah. 2012
The study of Assamese literature has so far been in terms of the history of the Assamese language. This book…
is a history of the narratives written in Assamese language and its relation to the process of region formation. The literature dealt with ranges from pre-colonial chronicles, ballads and drama to modern genres of fiction and critical writing in Assamese language. Taking the Brahmaputra valley and Assamese literature as case studies, the author attempts to link literature, its nature and use, to processes of region formation, arguing that such a study needs to take the context of historical geography into consideration. The book views region formation in north-east India as a dialectical process, that is, the dialectic between the shared and the distinct in inter-group and community relations. It borrows an anthropological approach to study written narratives and cultures so as to locate such narratives in specific processes of region formation.Forbidden Sex, Forbidden Texts: New India's Gay Poets
By Hoshang Merchant. 2009
The book argues that there is no monolithic homosexuality; there are only homosexualities, that is, there are as many reasons…
for being gay as there are gays. Some people are born gay, some have gayness thrust upon them, and some do, indeed, achieve to great gayness. Representation of homosexuality/homoeroticism, as it is understood today, is thus a western import. The act and public/social discourses on same-sex love are still illegal; it is, according to many, against the Indian ‘tradition’; and a sense of ‘history’ is seriously problematic when we dig out for a past tradition of homoerotic love and desire. Hoshang Merchant, through an examination of texts, films, poetry, attempts to analyse and crack the codes of sexual (mis)conduct in contemporary India, giving short histories of the fate of several gay writers and explaining the difficulties of ‘coming out’.Shakespeare and Game of Thrones
By Jeffrey R. Wilson. 2021
It is widely acknowledged that the hit franchise Game of Thrones is based on the Wars of the Roses, a…
bloody fifteenth-century civil war between feuding English families. In this book, Jeffrey R. Wilson shows how that connection was mediated by Shakespeare, and how a knowledge of the Shakespearean context enriches our understanding of the literary elements of Game of Thrones. On the one hand, Shakespeare influenced Game of Thrones indirectly because his history plays significantly shaped the way the Wars of the Roses are now remembered, including the modern histories and historical fictions George R.R. Martin drew upon. On the other, Game of Thrones also responds to Shakespeare’s first tetralogy directly by adapting several of its literary strategies (such as shifting perspectives, mixed genres, and metatheater) and tropes (including the stigmatized protagonist and the prince who was promised). Presenting new interviews with the Game of Thrones cast, and comparing contextual circumstances of composition—such as collaborative authorship and political currents—this book also lodges a series of provocations about writing and acting for the stage in the Elizabethan age and for the screen in the twenty-first century. An essential read for fans of the franchise, as well as students and academics looking at Shakespeare and Renaissance literature in the context of modern media.The Absent God in the Works of William Wordsworth (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)
By Eliza Borkowska. 2021
Called by one of its reviewers "Wordsworth’s biographia literaria," this book takes its reader on a fascinating journey into the…
mind of the poet whose attitude to God and religion points to a major shift in Western culture. The monograph probes the philosophical foundations of Wordsworth’s religious outlook, drawing attention to this First Generation Romantic poet as the author who happened to record in his verse the rise to prominence of some of the intellectual and spiritual challenges and the most troublesome uncertainties that have defined Western man ever since. The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with the companion volume, The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth. These two works can be regarded as contraries—or negatives: one offering an ironically positive reading of Wordsworth’s religious discourse, the other offering a reading which is positively negative.Fourteen On Form: Conversations With Poets
By Martha H. Swain, William Baer. 2004
Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets by William Baer. Interviews with Willis Barnstone, Robert Conquest, Wendy Cope, Douglas Dunn, Anthony…
Hecht, John Hollander, Donald Justice, X. J. Kennedy, Maxine Kumin, Frederick Morgan, John Frederick Nims, W. D. Snodgrass, Derek Walcott, and Richard Wilbur. When free verse and its many movements seemed to dominate poetry, other writers worked steadfastly, insistently, and majestically in traditional forms of rhyme and meter. Such poets as Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Derek Walcott, and Richard Wilbur utilized sonnets, villanelles, blank verse, and many other forms to create dazzling, lasting work. Their writing posed a counterpoint to free verse, sustained a tradition in English language verse, and eventually inspired the movement called New Formalism. Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets collects interviews with some of the most influential poets of the last fifty years. William Baer, editor of The Formalist, asks incisive questions that allow writers to discuss in detail a wide range of topics related to their work, methods of composition, and the contemporary poetry scene. Maxine Kumin reflects on being a woman poet during a period in which women were not encouraged to submit to journals. With clarity and passion, Walcott remembers the impetus of his famous "Eulogy to W. H. Auden." British poet Wendy Cope talks about the differences between how her barbed poems are received in England and abroad. The conversations return continually to the serious matter of poetic craft, especially the potential power of form in poetry. These well-paced conversations showcase poets discussing their creative lives with insight and candor. The sum total of their forthright opinions in Fourteen on Form not only elucidates the current situation of the art form, but it also serves as a primer for understanding the fundamental craft of poetics. William Baer is a professor of English at the University of Evansville and the editor of The Formalist. He edited Elia Kazan: Interviews and Conversations with Derek Walcott, both published by University Press of Mississippi.World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics
By J. Daniel Elam. 2021
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and…
unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.Passing Orders: Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare
By S. Jonathon O'Donnell. 2021
Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis…
of evangelical “spiritual warfare” demonologies in contemporary America. Situating spiritual warfare as part of broader frameworks of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire management, author S. Jonathon O’Donnell exposes the theological foundations of the systems of queer- and transphobia, anti-blackness, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current U.S. political order.O’Donnell argues that demonologies are not only tools of dehumanization but also ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies—models of the “right ordering” of space, time, and bodies that stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Alternative orders are demonized as passing, framed as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. Yet these orders refuse to simply pass on, instead giving strength to deviant desires that challenge the legitimacy of sovereign violence. Critically examining this challenge in the demonologies of three figures—Jezebel, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders re-imagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Irish Culture, Memory, Place)
By Joseph Valente, Margot Gayle Backus. 2020
Even though the Irish child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have appeared steadily in the media, many children…
remain in peril. In The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature, Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus examine modern cultural responses to child sex abuse in Ireland. Using descriptions of these scandals found in newspapers, historiographical analysis, and 20th- and 21st-century literature, Valente and Backus expose a public sphere ardently committed to Irish children's souls and piously oblivious to their physical welfare. They offer historically contextualized and psychoanalytically informed readings of scandal narratives by nine notable modern Irish authors who actively, pointedly, and persistently question Ireland's responsibilities regarding its children. Through close, critical readings, a more nuanced and troubling account emerges of how Ireland's postcolonial heritage has served to enable such abuse. The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature refines the debates on why so many Irish children were lost by offering insight into the lived experience of both the children and those who failed them.Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State
By Gareth Williams. 2021
This book makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world…
of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. Infrapolitical Passages proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. In doing so, Gareth Williams makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. The book offers a theory of globalization as a gigantic, directionless crisis in humanity’s symbolic organization, as well as a theory of global economic warfare as the very positing of directionlessness and, at the same time, facticity. Williams’s infrapolitics stands at a distance from the biopolitical, which it understands as domination presenting itself as the production of specific forms of subjectivity in the face of the commodity. The subsequent obscuring of being signals the need to circumvent the instrumentalization of life as subordination to the metaphysics of subjectivity, representation, and politics. Infrapolitical Passages works to confront that which is unavailable in subjectivity and representation, opening a way for facticity in the age of globalization in order to make room for the infrapolitical question for existence.Proustian Uncertainties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time
By Saul Friedländer. 2020
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian revisits Marcel Proust&’s masterpiece in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of identity—that…
of the novel&’s narrator and Proust&’s own. This engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does this reflect the author&’s position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author&’s life doesn&’t give obvious answers. The narrator&’s reflections on time, on death, on memory, and on love are as many paths leading to the image of self that he projects. In Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer draws on his personal experience from a life spent investigating the ties between history and memory to offer a fresh perspective on the seminal work.Is Reading the Bible the Fastest Way to Lode Your Faith?For centuries, the Bible was called "the Good Book," a…
moral and religious text that guides us into a relationship with God and shows us the right way to live. Today, however, some people argue the Bible is outdated and harmful, with many Christians unaware of some of the odd and disturbing things the Bible says.Whether you are a Christian, a doubter, or someone exploring the Bible for the first time, bestselling author Dan Kimball guides you step-by-step in how to make sense of these difficult and disturbing Bible passages. Filled with stories, visual illustrations, and memes reflecting popular cultural objections, How (Not) to Read the Bible is a lifeline for individuals who are confused or discouraged with questions about the Bible. It also works great as a small-group study or sermon series.XShibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan (Lit Z)
By Marc Redfield. 2021
Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the linguistic performances behind the politics of border crossings and the…
policing of identities.In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders. It has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. The various phenomena we sum up as neoliberalism and globalization are unimaginable in the absence of shibboleth-technologies.In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. This book interprets the episode in Judges together with Celan’s poems and Jacques Derrida’s reading of them, as well as passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern. Redfield pursues the track of shibboleth: a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers a locus of poetico-political affirmation.Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War
By Amy L. Hubbell. 2020
Hoarding Memory looks at the ways the stories of the Algerian War (1954–62) have proliferated among the former French citizens…
of Algeria. By engaging hoarding as a model, Amy L. Hubbell demonstrates the simultaneously productive and destructive nature of clinging to memory. These memories present massive amounts of material, akin to the stored objects in a hoarder&’s house. Through analysis of fiction, autobiography, art, and history that extensively use collecting, layering, and repetition to address painful war memories, Hubbell shows trauma can be hidden within its own representation.Hoarding Memory dedicates chapters to specific authors and artists who use this hoarding technique: Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, and Benjamin Stora in writing and Nicole Guiraud and Patrick Altes in art. All were born in Algeria during colonial French rule but in vastly different contexts; each suffered personal or inherited trauma from racism, physical or psychological abuse, terrorist or other violent acts of war, and exile in France. Zineb Sedira&’s artwork is also included as an example of traumatic memory inherited from her parents. Ultimately this book shows how traumatic experience can be conveyed in a seemingly open account that is compounded and compacted by the volume of words, images, and other memorial debris that testify to the pain.