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The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (Canons Ser.)
By W. Lewis Hyde. 2012
September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem
By Ian Sansom. 2017
One poet, his poem, New York City, and a world on the verge of change.W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a…
victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality, became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left. And his poem, “September 1, 1939,” was his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed—or been condemned—to a tragic and unexpected afterlife.These are the contributing forces underlying Ian Sansom’s work excavating the man and his most celebrated piece of literature. But Sansom’s book is also about New York City: an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939—about to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world.And so it is also about a world at a point of change—about 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Auden’s poem in its entirety on their editorial pages.More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, this is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.Reading Old Books: Writing with Traditions
By Professor Peter Mack. 2019
A wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from Chaucer to the presentIn literary and cultural studies, "tradition"…
is a word everyone uses but few address critically. In Reading Old Books, Peter Mack offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the twenty-first century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings.Reading Old Books argues that the best way to understand tradition is by examining the moments when a writer takes up an old text and writes something new out of a dialogue with that text and the promptings of the present situation. The book examines Petrarch as a user, instigator, and victim of tradition. It shows how Chaucer became the first great English writer by translating and adapting a minor poem by Boccaccio. It investigates how Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser made new epic meanings by playing with assumptions, episodes, and phrases translated from their predecessors. It analyzes how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell drew on tradition to address the new problem of urban deprivation in Mary Barton. And, finally, it looks at how the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his 2004 novel Wizard of the Crow, reflects on biblical, English literary, and African traditions.Drawing on key theorists, critics, historians, and sociologists, and stressing the international character of literary tradition, Reading Old Books illuminates the not entirely free choices readers and writers make to create meaning in collaboration and competition with their models.Fabulous Monsters: Dracula, Alice, Superman, and Other Literary Friends
By Alberto Manguel. 2019
An original look at how literary characters can transcend their books to guide our lives, by one of the world's…
most eminent bibliophiles Alberto Manguel, in a style both charming and erudite, examines how literary characters live with us from childhood on. Throughout the years, they change their identities and emerge from behind their stories to teach us about the complexities of love, loss, and the world itself. Manguel’s favorite characters include Jim from Huckleberry Finn, Phoebe from The Catcher in the Rye, Job and Jonah from the Bible, Little Red Riding Hood and Captain Nemo, Hamlet’s mother, and Dr. Frankenstein’s maligned Monster. Sharing his unique powers as a reader, Manguel encourages us to establish our own literary relationships. An intimate preface and Manguel’s own “doodles” complete this delightful and magical book.Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
By Michael Schmidt. 2019
Reflections on a lost poem and its rediscovery by contemporary poetsGilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist.…
It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again in the 1850s, it tells the story of a great king, his heroism, and his eventual defeat. It is a story of monsters, gods, and cataclysms, and of intimate friendship and love. Acclaimed literary historian Michael Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today.Schmidt describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis. Fragments of the poem, incised on clay tablets, were scattered across a huge expanse of desert when it was recovered in the nineteenth century. The poem had to be reassembled, its languages deciphered. The discovery of a pre-Noah flood story was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic, and the poem's allure only continues to grow as additional cuneiform tablets come to light. Its translation, interpretation, and integration are ongoing.In this illuminating book, Schmidt discusses the special fascination Gilgamesh holds for contemporary poets, arguing that part of its appeal is its captivating otherness. He reflects on the work of leading poets such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose own encounters with the poem are revelatory, and he reads its many translations and editions to bring it vividly to life for readers.Writing Revolution in Latin America: From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño
By Juan E. De Castro. 2019
In the politically volatile period from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, Latin American authors were in…
direct dialogue with the violent realities of their time and place. Writing Revolution in Latin America is a chronological study of the way revolution and revolutionary thinking is depicted in the fiction composed from the eye of the storm.From Mexico to Chile, the gradual ideological evolution from a revolutionary to a neoliberal mainstream was a consequence of, on the one hand, the political hardening of the Cuban Revolution beginning in the late 1960s, and, on the other, the repression, dictatorships, and economic crises of the 1970s and beyond. Not only was socialist revolution far from the utopia many believed, but the notion that guerrilla uprisings would lead to an easy socialism proved to be unfounded. Similarly, the repressive Pinochet dictatorship in Chile led to unfathomable tragedy and social mutation.This double-edged phenomenon of revolutionary disillusionment became highly personal for Latin American authors inside and outside Castro's and Pinochet's dominion. Revolution was more than a foreign affair, it was the stuff of everyday life and, therefore, of fiction.Juan De Castro's expansive study begins ahead of the century with José Martí in Cuba and continues through the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, and Roberto Bolaño in Mexico (by way of Chile). The various, often contradictory ways the authors convey this precarious historical moment speaks in equal measure to the social circumstances into which these authors were thrust and to the fundamental differences in the ways they themselves witnessed history.This book is a study of the concept of wilāya and its developments among Shīʿī scholars from the eighteenth to…
twentieth century. Leila Chamankhah addresses a number of issues by delving into the conceptualizations of wilāya through the examination and interpretation of key texts. She focuses on the influence of ibn ʿArabī’s mysticism, with regard to the conception of wilāya, on his Shīʿa successors and expositors in later centuries. She also discusses the development and transformation of the conception of wilāya over two hundred years, from the esoteric school of Shaykhīsm to the politicization of wilāya in the theory of wilāyat al-faqīh.Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)
By Celucien L. Joseph, Suchismita Banerjee, Marvin E. Hobson, Danny M. Hoey. 2018
Providing an intellectual interpretation to the work of Edwidge Danticat, this new edited collection provides a pedagogical approach to teach…
and interpret her body of work in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat starts out by exploring diasporic categories and postcolonial themes such as gender constructs, cultural nationalism, cultural and communal identity, and moves to investigate Danticat’s human rights activism, the immigrant experience, the relationship between the particular and the universal, and the violence of hegemony and imperialism in relationship with society, family, and community. The Editors of the collection have carefully compiled works that show how Danticat’s writings may help in building more compassionate and relational human communities that are grounded on the imperative of human dignity, respect, inclusion, and peace.A Glossary of Literary Terms
By M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey Galt Harpham. 2009
This book defines and discusses terms, critical theories, and points of view that are commonly applied in classifying, analyzing, interpreting,…
and writing the history of works of literature. The component entries, together with the guides to further reading included in most of them, are oriented especially toward undergraduate students of English, American, and other literatures. Over the decades, however, the book has proved to be a useful and popular work of reference for advanced students, as well as for the general reader with literary interests.Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction
By Melanie R. Anderson, Lisa Kröger. 2019
Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of…
Hill House and beyond. Frankenstein was just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction. Everyone knows about Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, who was rumored to keep her late husband’s heart in her desk drawer. But have you heard of Margaret “Mad Madge” Cavendish, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier (and liked to wear topless gowns to the theater)? If you know the astounding work of Shirley Jackson, whose novel The Haunting of Hill House was reinvented as a Netflix series, then try the psychological hauntings of Violet Paget, who was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women in the Victorian era. You’ll meet celebrated icons (Ann Radcliffe, V. C. Andrews), forgotten wordsmiths (Eli Colter, Ruby Jean Jensen), and today’s vanguard (Helen Oyeyemi). Curated reading lists point you to their most spine-chilling tales.Part biography, part reader’s guide, the engaging write-ups and detailed reading lists will introduce you to more than a hundred authors and over two hundred of their mysterious and spooky novels, novellas, and stories.Graham Greene: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
By Graham Greene. 2019
A master of twentieth century fiction, Graham Greene looks back on his life. This volume also includes several key interviews…
from throughout his long, fruitful career.Graham Greene led one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century. The son of a Hertfordshire headmaster, he quickly discovered a love for writing, beginning a career that would last a lifetime. Greene's fascination with global politics took him around the world, to places that would become the settings for many of his most famous novels: Mexico (The Power and the Glory), Sierra Leone (The Heart of the Matter), and Haiti (The Comedians) - among dozens of other far-flung locations. He produced masterpieces throughout his life, many of which now stand as indisputably canonical: Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American to name but a few.Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America
By Professor Nadia Nurhussein. 2019
The first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth…
and early twentieth centuriesAs the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. In Black Land, Nadia Nurhussein delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power.Nurhussein navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1935, Nurhussein illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists. American media coverage of the African nation exposed a clear contrast between the Pan-African ideal and the modern reality of Ethiopia as an antidemocratic imperialist state: Did Ethiopia represent the black nation of the future, or one of an inert and static past?Revising current understandings of black transnationalism, Black Land presents a well-rounded exploration of an era when Ethiopia’s presence in African American culture was at its height.Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing
By Elizabeth Marshall, Leigh Gilmore. 2019
When more than 150 women testified in 2018 to the sexual abuse inflicted on them by Dr. Larry Nassar when…
they were young, competitive gymnasts, they exposed and transformed the conditions that shielded their violation, including the testimonial disadvantages that cluster at the site of gender, youth, and race. In Witnessing Girlhood, Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall argue that they also joined a long tradition of autobiographical writing led by women of color in which adults use the figure and narrative of child witness to expose harm and seek justice. Witnessing Girlhood charts a history of how women use life narrative to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response. Drawing on a deep and diverse archive of self-representational forms—slave narratives, testimonio, memoir, comics, and picture books—Gilmore and Marshall attend to how authors return to a narrative of traumatized and silenced girlhood and the figure of the child witness in order to offer public testimony. Emerging within these accounts are key scenes and figures that link a range of texts and forms from the mid–nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Gilmore and Marshall offer a genealogy of the reverberations across timelines, self-representational acts, and jurisdictions of the child witness in life writing. Reconstructing these historical and theoretical trajectories restores an intersectional testimonial history of writing by women of color about sexual and racist violence to the center of life writing and, in so doing, furthers our capacity to engage ethically with representations of vulnerability, childhood, and collective witness.The Sociology of Disaster: Fictional Explorations of Human Experiences
By Thomas E. Drabek. 2020
In a book as illuminating as it is captivating, Thomas E. Drabek presents an in-depth analysis of the emotional impacts…
of disaster events and the many ripple effects that follow. Through the technique of storytelling, a series of nine fictional stories where characters experience actual disasters of different types throughout the United States illustrate the vulnerabilities and resilience to enhance the readers understanding of disaster consequences. Designed for classroom use, each story is followed by an "Analysis" section wherein discussion and research paper topics are recommended. These highlight links to published research findings. A "References" section details citations for all works included. Brief commentary in a "Notes" section adds further connections to other disasters and relevant research studies. The Sociology of Disaster is an important innovation in disaster education and will become an invaluable resource within universities and colleges that offer degrees in emergency management at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously…
absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing—including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements—has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others—both human and nonhuman—in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.La favorita del inca
By Raúl Tola. 2019
"Nunca estuvo tan tranquila la vaguada. El viento no agita las copas de los guayacanes, ni peina las tupidas melenas…
de los mangles ni silba entre los tallos de las totoras. (...) Siempre son más calladas las noche que suceden a la batalla". La favorita del Inca acaba de ser asesinada mientras la corte imperial se halla reunida en el palacio. Todos piensan que se trata de un accidente, menos Amaru, mensajero real, quien tendrá que encontrar al culpable del crimen o de lo contrario pagará con su vida. Raúl Tola nos entrega La favorita del Inca, novela en clave policial donde un asesinato es la excusa para revelar los complejos mecanismos del poder durante el imperio legendario de Pachacútec. Una lectura que atrapará al lector quien, de la mano del chasqui Amaru, emprenderá una aventura en la nada será lo que parece ser.Chinese Ibsenism: Reinventions of Women, Class and Nation
By Kwok-Kan Tam. 2019
This book is a study of the relation between theatre art and ideology in the Chinese experimentations with new selfhood…
as a result of Ibsen’s impact. It also explores Ibsenian notions of self, women and gender in China and provides an illuminating study of Chinese theatre as a public sphere in the dissemination of radical ideas. Ibsen is the major source of modern Chinese selfhood which carries notions of personal and social liberation and has exerted great impacts on Chinese revolutions since the beginning of the twentieth century. Ibsen’s idea of the self as an individual has led to various experimentations in theatre, film and fiction to project new notions of selfhood, in particular women’s selfhood, throughout the history of modern China. Even today, China is experimenting with Ibsen’s notions of gender, power, individualism and self.Kwok-kan Tam is Chair Professor of English and Dean of Humanities and Social Science at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He was Head (2012-18) and is currently a member of the International Ibsen Committee, University of Oslo. He is a Foundation Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. He has held teaching, research and administrative positions in various institutions, including the East-West Center, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Open University of Hong Kong. He has published numerous books and articles on Ibsen, Gao Xingjian, modern drama, Chinese film, postcolonial literature, and world Englishes. His recent books include Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film (2019), The Englishized Subject: Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia (2019), and a co-edited volume Fate and Prognostication in the Chinese Literary Imagination (2019).Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
By Patricia Novillo-Corvalán. 2015
This is the first study to examine the representation of illness, disability, and cultural pathologies in modern and contemporary Iberian…
and Latin American literature. Innovative and interdisciplinary, the collection situates medicine as an important and largely overlooked discourse in these literatures, while also considering the social, political, religious, symbolic, and metaphysical dimensions underpinning illness. Investigating how Hispanic and Lusophone writers have reflected on the personal and cultural effects of illness, it raises central questions about how medical discourses, cultural pathologies, and the art of healing in general are represented. Essays pay particular attention to the ways in which these interdisciplinary dialogues chart new directions in the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures, and emerging disciplines such as the medical humanities. Addressing a wide range of themes and subjects including bioethics, neuroscience, psychosurgery, medical technologies, Darwinian evolution, indigenous herbal medicine, the rising genre of the pathography, and the ‘illness as metaphor’ trope, the collection engages with the discourses of cultural studies, gender studies, disability studies, comparative literature, and the medical humanities. This book enriches and stimulates scholarship in these areas by showing how much we still have to gain from interdisciplinary studies working at the intersections between the humanities and the sciences.The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century French Literature traces the evolution of the relationship between artists and animals in fiction…
from the Second Empire to the fin de siècle. This book examines examples of visual literature, inspired by the struggles of artists such as Edouard Manet and Vincent van Gogh. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s Manette Salomon (1867), Émile Zola’s Therèse Raquin (1867), Jules Laforgue’s “At the Berlin Aquarium” (1895) and “Impressionism” (1883), Octave Mirbeau’s In the Sky (1892-1893) and Rachilde’s L’Animale (1893) depict vanguard painters and performers as being like animals, whose unique vision revolted against stifling traditions. Juxtaposing these literary works with contemporary animal theory (McHugh, Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida), zoo studies (Berger, Rothfels and Lippit) and feminism (Donovan, Adams and Haraway), Claire Nettleton explores the extent to which the nineteenth-century dissolution of the human subject contributed to a radical, modern aesthetic. Utilizing these interdisciplinary methodologies, Nettleton argues that while inducing anxiety regarding traditional humanist structures, the “artist-animal,” an embodiment of artistic liberation within an urban setting, is, at the same time, a paradigmatic trope of modernity.Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England: Receptions and Transformations from the Renaissance to the Romantic Period (New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800)
By Ladan Niayesh, Claire Gallien. 2019
The concept of resonance collapses the binary between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, evoking a sound or image that…
is prolonged and augmented by making contact with another surface. This collection uses resonance as an innovative framework for understanding the circulation of people and objects between England and its multiple Asian Easts. Moving beyond Saidian Orientalism to engage with ongoing critical conversations in the fields of connected history, material culture, and thing theory, it offers a vibrant range of case studies that consider how meanings accrue and shift through circulation and interconnection from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spanning centuries of traveling translations, narratives, myths, practices, and other cultural phenomena, Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England puts forth resonance not just as a metaphor, but a mode of investigation.