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Showing 161 - 180 of 27768 items
By Manju Jaidka, Tej N. Dhar. 2024
Today, Indian writing in English is a fi eld of study that cannot be overlooked. Whereas at the turn of…
the 20th century, writers from India who chose to write in English were either unheeded or underrated, with time the literary world has been forced to recognize and accept their contribution to the corpus of world literatures in English. Showcasing the burgeoning field of Indian English writing, this encyclopedia documents the poets, novelists, essayists, and dramatists of Indian origin since the pre-independence era and their dedicated works. Written by internationally recognized scholars, this comprehensive reference book explores the history and development of Indian writers, their major contributions, and the critical reception accorded to them. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English will be a valuable resource to students, teachers, and academics navigating the vast area of contemporary world literature.By Rebecca Ann Bach. 2023
This monograph contends that attending to Pratchett’s work could help to save our world. It draws attention to the astonishing…
capacity of Pratchett’s novels to inspire and argues that Pratchett’s fantasy novels directly address many of the most significant challenges people in the world face: the explosion of weapons technology; the myriad issues involved in the envelopment of human life by corporatized information technology; the destructive human inattention to, and interactions with, the Earth and its life forms; and the problem of devalued labor. Paradoxically, it is Pratchett’s choice of fantasy that lets him address the reality of major issues that humanity and the rest of life confront now. Pratchett’s novels show us how to better understand and confront the problems the world is contending with. The book will interest both scholars and fans.This book proposes that Ballard’s novels extrapolate the formation of a posthuman subjectivity that is centred around an affirmative understanding…
of what a human body can do. This new subjectivity transforms constraints and prescribed desires into creative openings in a hyper-mediated control society that conditions docile bodies through technology and consumerism. Set in surrealist predicaments in postwar affluent Western societies, Ballard’s novels remind us of the fragile veneer of order in the familiar every day. In these moments of crisis, complacent characters are compelled to undergo a process of defamiliarisation and transformation of their understanding of the self and the body. The ability to form new relationships with the unfamiliar is imperative to survival in a hostile environment. Ballard delineates both the possibilities and obstacles of forming these relationships. In particular, the author attributes the failure to do so to the irreconcilable contradictions of late capitalism.By Timothy J. Burbery. 2021
Gold-guarding griffins, Cyclopes, killer lakes, man-eating birds, and "fire devils" from the sky—such wonders have long been dismissed as fictional.…
Now, thanks to the richly interdisciplinary field of geomythology, researchers are taking a second look. It turns out that these and similar tales, which originated in pre-literate societies, contain surprisingly accurate, pre-scientific intuitions about startling or catastrophic earth-based phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the unearthing of bizarre animal bones. Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events provides an accessible, engaging overview of this hybrid discipline. The introductory chapter surveys geomythology’s remarkable history and its core concepts, while the second and third chapters analyze the geomythical resonances of universal earth tales about dragons and giants. Chapter 4 narrows the focus to regional stories and discusses the ways these and other myths have influenced legends about griffins, Cyclopes, and other iconic creatures. The final chapter considers future avenues of research in geomythology, including geohazard management, geomythology databases, geomythical "cold cases," and ways the discipline might eventually set, rather than merely support, research agendas in science. Thus, the book constitutes a valuable asset for scientists and lay readers alike, particularly in a time of growing interest in monsters, massive climate change, and natural disasters.Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness, and heteronormativity in children’s literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations…
of sex and sexuality in texts for young people. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non-fiction writing, picture books, film and television and graphic novels position young people in relation to ideologies around sexuality, sexual identity, and embodiment. This book questions how such texts communicate a sense of what is possible, impossible, taboo, or encouraged in terms of being sexual and sexual being. Each chapter is motivated by a set of important questions: How are representations of sex and sexuality depicted in texts for young people? How do these representations affect and shape the kinds of sexualities offered as models to young readers? And to what extent is sexual diversity acknowledged and represented across different narrative and aesthetic modes? This work brings together a diverse range of conceptual and theoretical approaches that are framed by the idea of sexual becoming: the manner in which texts for young people invite their readers to assess and potentially adopt ways of thinking and being in terms of sex and sexuality.The first to focus on the (re-)presentations of oil in dramatic literature, theatre, and performance, Oil and Modern World Dramas…
is a pioneering volume in the emerging field of Oil Literatures and Cultures, and the more established field of World Literatures. Through close analysis, Fakhrkonandeh demonstrates how these dramatic works depict oil, both in its perceived nature and character, as an overdetermined matter/sign/object: a symbol (of freedom, autonomy, speed, wealth, modernity, enlightenment), a commodity, a social-cultural agent, a social relation, and a hyper-object. This book is also distinguished by its innovative and critically manifold conceptual framework, positing the petro-literatures and petro-cultures an inextricable part of a global network. Oil and Modern World Dramas not only demonstrates how the chosen works of petro-drama manifest these concepts in their social-political vision, aesthetics and historical-ontological dynamics, but also reveals how they deploy such assemblage-based approaches both as a cartographical means and aesthetic method for exposing the systemic (Capitalocenic) nature of petro-capitalist exploitation, and as means of proposing ways of resistance and producing alternative modes of subjectivity, community, relationality, and economy.By Katie Baker and Naomi Walker. 2023
This collection explores how nineteenth and twentieth-century women writers incorporated the idea of ‘place’ into their writing. Whether writing from…
a specific location or focusing upon a particular geographical or imaginary place, women writers working between 1850 and 1950 valued ‘a space of their own’ in which to work. The period on which this collection focuses straddles two main areas of study, nineteenth century writing and early twentieth century/modernist writing, so it enables discussion of how ideas of space progressed alongside changes in styles of writing. It looks to the many ways women writers explored concepts of space and place and how they expressed these through their writings, for example how they interpreted both urban and rural landscapes and how they presented domestic spaces. A Space of Their Own will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and modernist works as it covers a period of immense change for women’s rights in society. It is also not limited to just one type or definition of ‘space’. Therefore, it may also be of interest to academics outside of literature – for example, in gender studies, cultural geography, place writing and digital humanities.By Carmen Laguarta-Bueno. 2023
This work studies three twenty-first century novels by Richard Powers, Dave Eggers and Don DeLillo as representative of a new…
trend of US fiction concerned with the topic of the technological augmentation of the human condition. The different chapters provide, from the double perspective of the optimistic transhumanist philosophy and the more balanced approach of critical posthumanism, an overview of the narrative strategies used by the writers to explore the possibilities that biotechnology, digital technologies and cryonics open up to transcend our human limitations, while also warning their readers of their most nefarious consequences. Ultimately, the book puts forward the claim that even if the writers approach the subject from a variety of perspectives and using different narrative styles and techniques, they all share a critical posthumanist fear that an unrestrained and unquestioned use of technology for enhancement purposes may bring about disembodiment and dehumanization.By Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes. 2022
The Anthropocene concept draws attention to the various forms of entanglement of social, political, ecological, biological and geological processes at…
multiple spatial and temporal scales. The ensuing complexity and ambiguity create manifold challenges to widely established theories, methodologies, epistemologies and ontologies. The contributions to this volume engage with conceptual issues of scale in the Anthropocene with a focus on mediated representation and narrative. They are centered around the themes of scale and time, scale and the nonhuman and scale and space. The volume presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, geography, political sciences, history and literary, cultural and media studies. Together, they contribute to current debates on the (re-)imagining of forms of human responsibility that meet the challenges created by humanity entering an age of scalar complexity.Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003136989This book examines the imperial spectacles and startling reversals of fortune related in William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest…
of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), and investigates how these accounts inspired fictional adaptations by George A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and George Griffith. The revision of history in the Amerindian adventure both entertained young transatlantic audiences and was a vehicle to attract tourism and investment in countries such as Mexico and Peru. Henty, Haggard, and Griffith, moreover, used their tales of adventure as a platform to impart British values to their readers. Such values compel the characters and narrators of the novels discussed to act as cultural mediators, to acquire indigenous languages and adopt native ways of being, and, in several of the romance adventures under consideration, to marry Mexican or Incan noblewomen. Part I, Conquest, examines George Henty’s By Right of Conquest: Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1891), H. Rider Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), and George Griffith’s Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (1898). Part II, Reclamation, argues that English re-writings of history work to eclipse the Spanish in Haggard’s Virgin the Sun (1922), Henty’s Treasure of the Incas (1902) and Griffith’s Romance of Golden Star (1897).By Margaret Ziolkowski. 2024
Mega-Dams in World Literature reveals the varied effects of large dams on people and their environments as expressed in literary works,…
focusing on the shifting attitudes toward large dams that emerged over the course of the twentieth century. Margaret Ziolkowski covers the enthusiasm for large-dam construction that took place during the mid-twentieth-century heyday of mega-dams, the increasing number of people displaced by dams, the troubling environmental effects they incur, and the types of destruction and protest to which they may be subject. Using North American, Native American, Russian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese novels and poems, Ziolkowski explores the supposed progress that these structures bring. The book asks how the human urge to exploit and control waterways has affected our relationships to nature and the environment and argues that the high modernism of the twentieth century, along with its preoccupation with development, casts the hydroelectric dam as a central symbol of domination over nature and the power of the nation state. Beyond examining the exultation of large dams as symbols of progress, Mega-Dams in World Literature takes a broad international and cultural approach that humanizes and personalizes the major issues associated with large dams through nuanced analyses, paying particular attention to issues engendered by high modernism and settler colonialism. Both general and specialist readers interested in human-environment relationships will enjoy this prescient book.By Fiona Barclay, Beatrice Ivey. 2024
This book engages with current debates around refugeedom by examining cultural production that represents and interrogates the construction of refugees…
and the refugee experience on the borders of contemporary Europe. The refugee subject is produced by discursive regimes and border practices inherited from colonial projects that construct the diametrically opposed concepts of citizen and refugee, and their attendant administrative sub-categories. In the early twenty-first century these categories have been strengthened by the politicisation of forced migration and the hardening of ‘Fortress Europe’. While the predominant response to the increasing numbers of refugees seeking asylum in Europe has been to harden the borders (regime), on the one hand, or to stress the common humanity of those displaced (refuge), on the other, this volume argues that both approaches result in refugees becoming objectified, othered, and abstracted as vectors ofexile. It explores what recent cultural production can achieve in engaging with and representing issues of dispossession, detention and resettlement, and probes the limits of artistic potential to mediate the refugee experience. It examines transnational approaches to cultural production that both occupy and exceed the borders of Europe, with a focus on borderscapes, spaces of detention, and (neo-)colonialism. Bringing together original contributions from an international range of scholars, it analyses contemporary textual and visual representations of forced migration to argue that other forms of solidarity and hospitality towards refugees in Europe and beyond must be possible.By Dervila Cooke. 2024
This book focuses on modes of cultural belonging in Québec. It looks at recent literary memoir, autobiographical fiction, and documentary…
testimony. Through four in-depth case studies of cultural creators, one Indigenous and three non-Indigenous, Dervila Cooke discusses multicultural and ethnically diverse society in Québec, examining current tensions, challenges, and opportunities. Works studied range from Abla Farhoud’s first novel in 1998 to Anita Aloisio’s 2022 documentary film Calliari, QC. Topics include the desire for freedom to self-ascribe and enact cultural identity, self-reinvention through fiction, expressions of Indigeneity in Naomi Fontaine, the term “Québécois”, especially after Bill 21, and the thorny question of integration of immigrants, discussed in relation to Akos Verboczy’s Rhapsodie québécoise. As with the companion volume on France, societal factors are discussed, here relating to the cultural renaissance of Indigenous writing, Farhoud’s Libano-Québécois context, and language laws in Québec, including the foundational Bill 101 and the more recent Bill 96.By Bernard Montoneri. 2024
Time Travel in World Literature and Cinema discusses various literary works, movies, and TV series with a special focus on…
time travel. Each chapter is written by professors and scholars from various countries, including the US, Japan, Germany, France, Spain, Taiwan, South Africa, Qatar, Russia, Ukraine and Australia. The book addresses themes of racism, sexism, feminism, and social injustice as well as dystopian futures. This will appeal to students and scholars studying science fiction, dystopian literature, world literature, and world cinema.By Andrija Matić. 2024
Aldous Huxley’s Short Fiction analyzes Huxley’s short stories within a modernist context, highlighting that he shared more characteristics with distinguished modernists…
than is usually believed. The book also explores other features of Huxley’s short stories, focusing on themes such as consumerism, mainstream education, shallow intellectualism, women’s emancipation, toxic masculinity, and sensational journalism, themes that correspond with both Huxley’s time and our world, and position him among the most prophetic authors of the twentieth century. This study demonstrates that Huxley’s short fiction can provide answers to questions that remain confusing or partially explained in the research on Huxley’s work. It illustrates the constants and changes in Huxley’s opinions on organized religion, mysticism, and the relation between sexuality and spirituality, while also clarifying Huxley’s political opinion, which is often misunderstood due to his advocacy of pacifism. Finally, the in-depth interpretations of Huxley’s short stories reveal the dynamics of his literary style, especially his complex humor and irony, areas he developed more than any other modernist author of short fiction.By Ármann Jakobsson, Sverrir Jakobsson. 2017
The last fifty years have seen a significant change in the focus of saga studies, from a preoccupation with origins…
and development to a renewed interest in other topics, such as the nature of the sagas and their value as sources to medieval ideologies and mentalities. The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas presents a detailed interdisciplinary examination of saga scholarship over the last fifty years, sometimes juxtaposing it with earlier views and examining the sagas both as works of art and as source materials. This volume will be of interest to Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian scholars and accessible to medievalists in general.By Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 2024
This is volume 18 issue 2 of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (EMW)…
is the only journal devoted solely to the interdisciplinary and global study of women and gender spanning the late medieval through early modern periods. Each volume gathers essays on early modern women from every country and region by scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines including art history, cultural studies, music, history, languages and literatures, political science, religion, theatre, history of science, and history of philosophy.By Signs and Society. 2024
This is volume 12 issue 1 of Signs and Society. Signs and Society is an open-access, multidisciplinary journal in the…
humanities and social sciences focusing on research that examines the role of sign processes (or semiosis) in social interaction, cognition, and cultural formations. Focusing directly on semiosis in its multiple dimensions, the journal aims to promote collaborative translation across analytical categories and technical vocabularies already established in anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, and related disciplines, and to uncover unanticipated parallels in the ways semiosis is manifest in diverse empirical domains.By Nicoletta Isar. 2024
Phenomenology, New Materialism, and Advances In the Pulsatile Imaginary: Rites Of Disimagination brings together scholars from art history and image…
theory, literary studies and philosophy. Chapters of this volume engage with the overarching theme of imagination as a pulsatile force embedded in words, images, and all imaginative modes of instantiation of the work of art in their elemental aspects, expressed in visual arts, and literature, as well as bodily schemata of choreographic and musical performances. The papers employ contrasting and complementing methods from literary studies and image theory, especially phenomenology and new materialism, such as G. Bachelard and M. Merleau-Ponty, G. Bataille, J. Kristeva, P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J. Sallis, G. Didi-Huberman, H. Belting and A. Warburg, J. Bennett and Jason M. Wirth, as well as performance studies. Chapters in this volume inquire into the imaginative forces that disrupt and disinhibit the traditional habits ofimagination to create pulsatile imaginaries, i.e., a dynamic process of “emergence-resurgence” of image manifested in the act of creation and in perception. This process does not properly imply a destruction of image, but rather a withdrawal of image from the realm of representation to give way to new images and new imaginative experiences. The newly coined term “rite of disimagination” points out to this operation, consecutively implying imagining and disimaging that both denies, as well as validates image – it valorizes matter. The affirmation of the materiality of image is “the re-incarnation of image.”This book presents an in-depth analysis of Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out…
(L&D). It explores how Goldblatt translates the original novel under the influence of three major manipulative powers: poetics, ideology and patronage, as well as his own subjectivity (translator subjectivity), to achieve his objectives as a literary translator. The author analyses both the translation and its paratext to gain a more complete understanding of Goldblatt’s accomplishments, and examines how Goldblatt rewrites the original text under the influence of various patronage factors, such as the original author, publisher, editor, market expectancy, literary collaborator, and the target reader. This book provides a comprehensive picture of the production, reception and dissemination of Goldblatt’s translation, exposing the motivations behind his translation in full measure, and it will be of interest to students and scholars of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature and Literary Studies, and Chinese Culture and Literature.