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Displacement and (Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing)
By Marja Sorvari. 2022
The book examines prominent literary works from the past two decades by Russian women writers dealing with the Soviet past. It…
explores works such as Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmilla Ulitskaya, The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, and uncovers connecting thematic structures and features. Focusing on the concepts of displacement and postmemory, the book shows how these works have given voice to those on the margins of society and of ‘great history’ whose resistance was often silent. In doing so, these women writers portray the everyday experiences and trauma of displaced women and girls during the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers new insights into the importance of these women writers’ work in creating and preserving cultural memory in post-Soviet Russia.The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
By Elizabeth Hardwick. 1951
Essays on music, art, pop culture, literature, and politics by the renowned essayist and observer of contemporary life, now collected…
together for the first time. The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected Essays, a book that proved a revelation of what, for many, had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick was one of the great American literary critics, and an extraordinary stylist in her own right. The thirty-five pieces that Alex Andriesse has gathered here—none previously featured in volumes of Hardwick&’s work—make it clear that her powers extended far beyond literary criticism, encompassing a vast range of subjects, from New York City to Faye Dunaway, from Wagner&’s Parsifal to Leonardo da Vinci&’s inventions, and from the pleasures of summertime to grits soufflé. In these often surprising, always well-wrought essays, we see Hardwick&’s passion for people and places, her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write well about seemingly anything.Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film
By Thomas Chen. 2022
The violent suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations is thought to be contemporary China’s most taboo subject. Yet despite…
sweeping censorship, Chinese culture continues to engage with the history, meaning, and memory of the Tiananmen movement. Made in Censorship examines the surprisingly rich corpus of Tiananmen literature and film produced in mainland China since 1989, both officially sanctioned and unauthorized, contending that censorship does not simply forbid—it also shapes what is created.Thomas Chen explores a wide range of works made despite and through censorship, including state propaganda, underground films, and controversial best-sellers. Moving across media, from print to the internet, TV to DVD, fiction to documentary, he shows the effects of state intervention on artistic production and consumption. Chen considers art at the edge of censorship, reading such disparate works as a queer love story shot without permission that found official release on DVD, an officially sanctioned film that was ultimately not permitted to be released, a novel built on orthographic elisions that was banned and eventually reissued, and an internet narrative set during the SARS epidemic later published with alterations. He also connects Tiananmen with the story of COVID-19 in China and considers the implications for debates about the reach and power of the Chinese state in the public realm, both domestic and abroad. A bold rethinking of contemporary Chinese literature and film, this book upends understandings of censorship, uncovering not just what it suppresses but also what it produces.The Owl and the Nightingale: A New Verse Translation
By Simon Armitage. 2022
From the UK Poet Laureate and bestselling translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a complete verse translation of…
a spirited and humorous medieval English poemThe Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest literary works in Middle English, is a lively, anonymous comic poem about two birds who embark on a war of words in a wood, with a nearby poet reporting their argument in rhyming couplets, line by line and blow by blow. In this engaging and energetic verse translation, Simon Armitage captures the verve and humor of this dramatic tale with all the cut and thrust of the original.In an agile iambic tetrameter that skillfully amplifies the prosody and rhythm of the original, Armitage’s translation moves entertainingly from the eloquent and philosophical to the ribald and ridiculous. Sounding at times like antagonists in a Twitter feud, the owl and the nightingale quarrel about a host of subjects that still resonate today—including love, marriage, identity, cultural background, class distinctions, and the right to be heard. Adding to the playful, raucous mood of the barb-trading birds is Armitage, who at one point inserts himself into the poem as a “magistrate . . . to adjudicate”—one who is “skilled with words & worldly wise / & frowns on every form of vice.”Featuring the Middle English text on facing pages and an introduction by Armitage, this volume will delight readers of all ages.A Vertical Art: On Poetry
By Simon Armitage. 2022
From the UK Poet Laureate and bestselling translator, a spirited book that demystifies and celebrates the art of poetry todayIn…
A Vertical Art, acclaimed poet Simon Armitage takes a refreshingly common-sense approach to an art form that can easily lend itself to grand statements and hollow gestures. Questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, he offers sparkling new insights about poetry and an array of favorite poets.Based on Armitage’s public lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, A Vertical Art illuminates poets as varied as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, A. R. Ammons, and Claudia Rankine. The chapters are often delightfully sassy in their treatment, as in “Like, Elizabeth Bishop,” in which Armitage dissects—and tallies—the poet’s predilection for similes. He discusses Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, poetic lists, poetry and the underworld, and the dilemmas of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Armitage also pulls back the curtain on the unromantic realities of making a living as a contemporary poet, and ends the book with his own list of “Ninety-Five Theses” on the principles and practice of poetry.An appealingly personal book that explores the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the viewpoint of a practicing writer and dedicated reader, A Vertical Art makes an insightful and entertaining case for the power and potential of poetry today.Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History
By Timothy Hampton. 2022
A timely story of a forgotten emotionCheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination…
of the West wherein cheerfulness — a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit — functions as a crucial theme in literary, philosophical, and artistic creations from early modern to contemporary times. In dazzling interpretations of Shakespeare and Montaigne, Hume, Austen and Emerson, Dickens, Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong, Hampton explores the philosophical construal of cheerfulness — as a theme in Protestant theology, a focus of medical writing, a topic in Enlightenment psychology, and a category of modern aesthetics. In a conclusion on cheerfulness in pandemic days, Hampton stresses the importance of lightness of mind under the pressure of catastrophe. A history of the emotional life of European and American cultures, a breathtaking exploration of the intersections of culture, literature, and psychology, Cheerfulness challenges the dominant narrative of Western aesthetics as a story of melancholy, mourning, tragedy, and trauma. Hampton captures the many appearances of this fleeting and powerfully transformative emotion whose historical and literary trajectory has never before been systematically traced.The Paranoid Chronotope: Power, Truth, Identity
By Frida Beckman. 2022
Why does it seem like our everyday life is shadowed by something menacing? This book identifies and illuminates paranoia as…
a significant feature of contemporary American society and culture. Centering on what it identifies as three key dimensions – power, truth, and identity – in three different contexts – society, literature, and critique – the book explores and explains the increasing influence of paranoid thinking in American society during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first, a period that has seen the rise of control systems and neoliberal ascendency. Inquiring about the predominance of white, male, American subjects in paranoid culture, Frida Beckman recognizes the antagonistic maintenance and fortification of a conception of the autonomous individual that perceives itself to be under threat. Identifying such paranoia as emerging from an increasingly disjunctive relation between this conception of the subject and the changing nature of the public sphere, she develops the concept of the paranoid chronotope as a tool for the theoretical analysis of social, literary, and critical practices today. Investigating twenty-first century paranoid fictions, New Sincerity novels, conspiracist online culture, and postcritique, Beckman shows how the paranoid chronotope constitutes a recurring feature of modern consciousness.Won in Translation: Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe (Material Texts)
By Roger Chartier. 2022
In Won in Translation Roger Chartier, one of the world's leading historians of books, publishing, and reading, considers the mobility…
of the early modern text and the plurality of circulating versions of the same work. The agent for both is translation, for through their lexical, aesthetic, and cultural decisions, translators always assign new meaning or new status to what they translate.Won in Translation proceeds by way of four case studies, three dedicated to works originally in Spanish, the fourth to a Portuguese dramatic adaptation of Don Quixote. Bartolomé de Las Casas' Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, first printed in 1552, was a powerful instrument for the construction of what was later called the "black legend" of Spanish monarchy. Baltasar Gracián's Oráculo Manual, published in 1647, became the most famous courtier's manual in Europe. Both traveled more widely and were translated more often than any other books of their era. For Chartier they illustrate the great power of translation, which allowed Las Casas' account to be placed in multiple and successive contexts and enabled Gracián's book to take on a range of meanings it had not originally had. Chartier's next two chapters are devoted to plays, one by Lope de Vega, the other by Antônio José da Silva. In the case of Lope's Fuente Ovejuna, the "translation" was one from historical chronicle to dramatic performance. In Antônio José da Silva's Vida do Grande D. Quixote, the textual migration is twofold, as Cervantes' hero moves from Spanish to Portuguese and from novel to play.In an Epilogue, Chartier moves three centuries forward to consider the paradox that it is the absolute immobility of the text, "reinvented" word for word, that creates its mobility in Jorge Luis Borges' fiction "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Works are transformed through changes of genre or language, to be sure; but even when the texts remain fixed, their readers give them different or inverted meaning.Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 (The New Middle Ages)
By Alfred Thomas. 2022
Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to “plague writing” from…
the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human “hardware” has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present (urbanization, technology, mass warfare, and advances in medical science), the human “software” (emotional and psychological reactions to the shock of pandemic) has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de Machaut, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, select plays by Shakespeare, and modern “plague” fiction and film, Alfred Thomas convincingly demonstrates psychological continuities between the Black Death and COVID-19. In showing how in times of plague human beings repress their fears and fantasies and displace them onto the threatening “other,” Thomas highlights the danger of scapegoating vulnerable minority groups such as Asian Americans and Jews in today’s America. This wide-ranging study will thus be of interest not only to medievalists but also to students of modernity as well as the general reader.Burke and Wills: The triumph and tragedy of Australia's most famous explorers
By Peter FitzSimons. 2017
The iconic Australian exploration story - brought to life by Peter FitzSimons, Australia's storyteller. 'They have left here today!' he…
calls to the others. When King puts his hand down above the ashes of the fire, it is to find it still hot. There is even a tiny flame flickering from the end of one log. They must have left just hours ago. MELBOURNE, 20 AUGUST 1860. In an ambitious quest to be the first Europeans to cross the harsh Australian continent, the Victorian Exploring Expedition sets off, farewelled by 15,000 cheering well-wishers. Led by Robert O'Hara Burke, a brave man totally lacking in the bush skills necessary for his task; surveyor and meteorologist William Wills; and 17 others, the expedition took 20 tons of equipment carried on six wagons, 23 horses and 26 camels. Almost immediately plagued by disputes and sackings, the expeditioners battled the extremes of the Australian landscape and weather: its deserts, the boggy mangrove swamps of the Gulf, the searing heat and flooding rains. Food ran short and, unable to live off the land, the men nevertheless mostly spurned the offers of help from the local Indigenous people. In desperation, leaving the rest of the party at the expedition's depot on Coopers Creek, Burke, Wills, Charley Gray and John King made a dash for the Gulf in December 1860. Bad luck and bad management would see them miss by just hours a rendezvous back at Coopers Creek, leaving them stranded in the wilderness with practically no supplies. Only King survived to tell the tale. Yet, despite their tragic fates, the names of Burke and Wills have become synonymous with perseverance and bravery in the face of overwhelming odds. They live on in our nation's history - and their story remains immediate and compelling.From Aristotle's Poetics to Vaclav Havel, the debate about the nature and function of theatre has been marked by controversy.…
Daniel Gerould's landmark work, Theatre/Theory/Theatre, collects history's most influential Eastern and Western dramatic theorists—poets, playwrights, directors and philosophers—whose ideas about theatre continue to shape its future. In complete texts and choice excerpts spanning centuries, we see an ongoing dialogue and exchange of ideas between actors and directors like Craig and Meyerhold, and writers such as Nietzsche and Yeats. Each of Gerould's introductory essays shows fascinating insight into both the life and the theory of the author. From Horace to Soyinka, Corneille to Brecht, this is an indispensable compendium of the greatest dramatic theory ever written.What to Read Next: How to Make Books Part of Your Life
By Stig Abell. 2020
An audiobook to help make books part of your life.For a whole year on his train to work, Stig Abell…
read books from across genres and time periods. Then he wrote about them, and their impact on our culture and his own life.The result is a work of many things: a brisk guide to the canon of Western literature; an intimate engagement with writers from Shakespeare to JK Rowling, Marcel Proust to Zora Neale Hurston; a wise and funny celebration of the power of words; and a meditation on mental unrest and how to tackle it. It will help you discover new books to love, give you the confidence to give up on those that you don't, and remind you of ones that you already do.What to Read Next: How to Make Books Part of Your Life has been written for the reader in all of us.(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton LtdMedio-translatology: Concepts and Applications (New Frontiers in Translation Studies)
By Defeng Li, Feng Cui. 2022
This book introduces the theory of Medio-translatology. Proposed by Professor Tianzhen Xie, Medio-translatology combines comparative literature with translation studies. It…
has been influential in Chinese Translation Studies since its emergence in the 1990s and has since generated a myriad of heated discussions and productive applications of the theory in the analysis of translation both as an activity and a product. With ten chapters authored by leading scholars in this area, this book explicates the development and the main theoretical tenets of Medio-translatology in the first part and demonstrates the application of the theory with a number of case analysis of translations by different translators in the second part. As the first and only edited book on Medio-translatology written in English, this volume will also provide a useful window on contemporary translation studies in China.Reshaping Philosophy: Michael Boylan’s Narrative Fiction
By Wanda Teays. 2022
This volume offers original essays exploring what ‘fictive narrative philosophy’ might mean in the research and teaching of philosophy. The…
first part of the book presents theoretical essays that examine Boylan’s recent books: Teaching Ethics with Three Philosophical Novels and Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Literature can Act as Philosophy. The second and third part offer essays on how Boylan executes his theory in the practice within his novels from his two series De Anima and Archē. The book clearly shows the unique aspects of the fictive narrative philosophy approach. First, it makes story-telling accessible to wide audiences. Second, story-telling techniques invoke devices that can set out complicated existential problems to the reader that offer an additional approach to thorny problems through the presentation of lived experience. Third, the discussion of these devices is a way to explore philosophical problems in a way that many can profit from. The book concludes with an essay in which Boylan responds to the critical challenges set out in Part One and the practical criticism set out in Parts Two and Three. Boylan addresses the key claims made by his objectors and defends his position. He engages with the authors in the way his theory is matched against his actual novels. This is useful reading for both philosophers and professors of literature teaching introductory as well as upper-level courses in the fields of philosophy, literature and criticism.The Art of Exploration: Lessons in Curiosity, Leadership and Getting Things Done
By Levison Wood. 2021
Levison Wood's most personal story yet, as he shares his most valuable rules to live life by, learned from fifteen…
years travelling through a hundred countries.In The Art of Exploration ex-soldier and explorer Levison Wood collates all the lessons he has learned from his journeys so far. Having written five books on his individual journeys, Levison recalls the most important learning points, on themes ranging from leadership and team-building to conceptual risk and spirituality, drawing on examples and anecdotes from across continents and cultures.Levison has always been inspired by the travels and tales of legendary explorers from Livingstone, Shackleton and Scott to modern-day figures like Ranulph Fiennes and John Blashford-Snell, and passes on lessons he has learned both from them and his own experiences on the road, to the next generation of explorers. 'By travelling at the slowest means on my journeys I have had the joy and pleasure of meeting thousands of inspiring and hopeful individuals along the way, in some of the most poverty-stricken and war-torn countries in the world. It's from these humbling characters - shepherds, soldiers and fishermen; and my walking companions like Boston, the Congolese refugee and Binod my Nepali guide that I have learnt so much about how to approach life both on the road and back home.'Many lessons of course are learned the hard way, through trial and error - and making plenty of mistakes. It's through tragedy and loss that the biggest lessons are learned. In this audiobook he talks about his own regrets and blunders that have resulted in growth and development and made him a better person. The Art of Exploration will bare all on the tough times and how Levison ended up dealing with them, providing both a reflective and entertaining account of life on the road.(P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton LimitedA Length of Road: Finding Myself in the Footsteps of John Clare: A John Murray Original
By Robert Hamberger. 2021
A memoir about love and loss, fatherhood and masculinity, class and belonging.In 1841 the 'peasant poet' John Clare escapes from…
an asylum in Epping Forest, where he had been kept for four years, and walks over eighty miles home to Northamptonshire. Suffering from poor mental health, Clare was attempting to return to his idealized first love, Mary, unaware that she had died three years earlier.In 1995, with his life in crisis and his own mental health fragile, Robert decides to retrace Clare's route along the Great North Road over a punishing four-day walk. As he walks he reflects on the changing landscape and on the evolving shape of his own family, on fatherhood and masculinity, and on the meaning of home.Part memoir, part travel-writing, part literary criticism, A Length of Road is a deeply profound and poetic exploration of class, gender, grief and sexuality through the author's own experiences and through the autobiographical writing of poet John Clare.(P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton LtdStoryland: A New Mythology of Britain
By Amy Jeffs. 2021
Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland tells a history of Britain and the politics of its people through medieval…
eyes. Grounded in research, related as fiction, it begins before the Great Flood, with a troop of African giants quarrying stones. Later, the first migrants enter the Atlantic, calling themselves the Scoti and Britons, followed by the English and the Normans, crossing the North Sea. Storyland is ancient Britain as you have never seen it before, mediated by the modern aesthetic of its linocut illustrations. It is filled with places we know today and characters half-remembered: Lear in Leicester, Merlin in Stonehenge, Grim in Grimsby, St Columba on the River Ness. Storyland is a tale of legend, landscape and the yearning to belong.(P)2021 Quercus Editions LimitedOh, What a Lovely Century: One man's marvellous adventures in love, war and high society
By Roderic Fenwick Owen. 2021
Read by Callum Scott Howells (It's A Sin), Hugh Skinner (W1A, Fleabag, Mumma Mia 2) and Simon Callow (Four Weddings…
and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, Outlander) 'A completely extraordinary autobiography. One that reads like the most outlandish, beguiling fiction but that is - amazingly - all true' - William Boyd, Sunday Times bestselling author'A wonderful journey through 20th Century history. I thoroughly enjoyed it' - Lady Anne Glenconner, author of Lady in Waiting'Outrageous fun...days after reaching page 560, I'm still feeling energised by the infectious optimism of the man' - The Times'Stuffed to the gills with raucous anecdotes and mesmerising detail ... Fenwick Owen's memoirs are witty and touching but also an important record of how society has changed' - Jessica Fellowes, author of The Mitford Murders ---For fear of growing up like his stiff-upper-lipped Uncle Dick, Roderic Fenwick Owen (1921-2011) survived Eton, Oxford and the Second World War to become a travel writer, experiencing the varied wonders of the 20th century's people and places in that guise. Frequently finding himself party to crucial historical events (including experiencing Nazi Germany in 1939 and the Pentagon during the Cold War Years), his life featured a stellar cast of characters from Eisenhower and Jackson Pollock to Christopher Lee and Sean Connery. At the heart of Roddy's writing adventures lay his search for love, even if just for the night. He fell head over heels for, and married a Polynesian princess while beachcombing in Tahiti, but when a dazzling trip to 1950s New York opened his eyes to the fact he was more attracted to men than women, he was forced to continue his quest for his soulmate under threat of danger. This was at a time when the police were prosecuting and imprisoning more gay men than ever before, including some of his friends. Lyrical, witty and at times jaw-droppingly unbelievable, Oh, What A Lovely Century is both a highly personal memoir and a marvellous obituary of an ever-changing and now lost world - that was frequently the best of times, and sometimes the worst.A Year of Living Simply: The joys of a life less complicated
By Kate Humble. 2020
'Simply wonderful.' - BEN FOGLE'Kate's book has the warmth and calming effect of a log fire and a glass of…
wine. Unknit your brow and let go. It's a treat.' - GARETH MALONE'Kate Humble pours her enviable knowledge into attainable goals. It's a winning combination and the prize - a life in balance with nature - is definitely worth claiming.' - LUCY SIEGLE'As ever, where Kate leads, I follow. She has made me reassess and reset.' - DAN SNOWIf there is one thing that most of us aspire to, it is, simply, to be happy. And yet attaining happiness has become, it appears, anything but simple. Having stuff - The Latest, The Newest, The Best Yet - is all too often peddled as the sure fire route to happiness. So why then, in our consumer-driven society, is depression, stress and anxiety ever more common, affecting every strata of society and every age, even, worryingly, the very young? Why is it, when we have so much, that many of us still feel we are missing something and the rush of pleasure when we buy something new turns so quickly into a feeling of emptiness, or purposelessness, or guilt?So what is the route to real, deep, long lasting happiness? Could it be that our lives have just become overly crowded, that we've lost sight of the things - the simple things - that give a sense of achievement, a feeling of joy or excitement? That make us happy. Do we need to take a step back, reprioritise? Do we need to make our lives more simple? Kate Humble's fresh and frank exploration of a stripped-back approach to life is uplifting, engaging and inspiring - and will help us all find balance and happiness every day.(p) 2020 Octopus Publishing GroupThe story of the Siege of Troy from the infamous Helen and her sister Klytemnestra's points of view - a…
tale of secrets, passion and revenge from the women behind mythology's most devastating war.Two sisters parted. Two women blamed. Two stories reclaimed.'Required reading for fans of Circe . . . a remarkable, thrilling debut' - Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth AvenueFor millennia, two women have been blamed for the fall of a mighty civilisation - but now it's time to hear their side of the story . . .As princesses of Sparta, Helen and Klytemnestra have known nothing but luxury and plenty. With their high birth and unrivalled beauty, they are the envy of all of Greece.Such privilege comes at a high price, though, and their destinies are not theirs to command. While still only girls they are separated and married off to legendary foreign kings Agamemnon and Menelaus, never to meet again. Their duty is now to give birth to the heirs society demands and be the meek, submissive queens their men expect.But when the weight of their husbands' neglect, cruelty and ambition becomes too heavy to bear, they must push against the constraints of their sex to carve new lives for themselves - and in doing so make waves that will ripple throughout the next three thousand years.Perfect for readers of Circe and Ariadne, Daughters of Sparta is a vivid and illuminating retelling of the Siege of Troy that tells the story of mythology's most vilified women from their own mouths at long last.Helen of Troy and her sister Klytemnestra are reimagined in this gorgeous retelling of the classic Greek myth - not as women defined by their husbands and lovers but as battle-weary survivors of a patriarchal society who take control of their own destiny. Absolutely riveting!' - Alka Joshi, New York Times bestselling author of The Henna Artist(P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd