What distinguishes modern tragedy from other forms of drama? How does it relate to contemporary political and social conditions? To what ends have artists employed the tragic form in different locations during the 20th century? Partly motivated by the urgency of our current situation in an age of ecocidal crisis, Modern Tragedy encompasses a variety of drama from throughout the 20th century. James Moran begins this book with John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1904), which shows how environmental awareness might be expressed through tragic drama. Moran also looks at Brecht's reworking of Synge's drama in the 1937 play Senora Carrar's Rifles, and situates Brecht's script in the light of the theatre practitioner's broader ideas about tragedy. Brecht's tragic thinking - informed by Hegel and Marx - is contrasted with the Schopenhauerian approach of Samuel Beckett. The volume goes on to examine theatre makers whose ideas were partly motivated by applying an understanding of the tragic narrative of Synge's Riders to the Sea to postcolonial contexts. Looking at Derek Walcott's The Sea at Dauphin (1954), and J.P. Clark's The Goat (1961), Modern Tragedy explores how tragedy, a form that is often associated with regressive assumptions about hegemony, might be rethought, and how aspects of the tragic may coincide with the experiences and concerns of authors and audiences of colour.

Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offences at age 20, and sent to high-security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for one day, to attend an event marking the fifth anniversary of a prison education programme he participated in. On 29 November, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers' Hall, some of whom he knew. Then he went to the bathroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists. That day, he killed two people: Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt. Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Merritt oversaw her program; Khan was one of her students. 'It is the immediate aftermath,' Taneja writes. '"I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh." The I is not only mine. It belongs to many.' In this searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, she draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition.

York Notes for GCSE offer an exciting approach to English Literature and will help you to achieve a better grade. This market-leading series has been completely updated to reflect the needs of today's students. The new editions are packed with detailed summaries, commentaries on key themes, characters, language and style, illustrations, exam advice and much more. Written by GCSE examiners and teachers, York Notes are the authoritative guides to exam success.

To understand the creative fabric of digital networks, scholars of literary and cultural studies must turn their attention to crowdsourced forms of production, discussion, and distribution. Digital Encounters explores the influence of an increasingly networked world on contemporary Latin American cultural production. Drawing on a spectrum of case studies, the contributors to this volume examine literature, art, and political activism as they dialogue with programming languages, social media platforms, online publishing, and geospatial metadata. Implicit within these connections are questions of power, privilege, and stratification. The book critically examines issues of inequitable access and data privacy, technology's capacity to divide people from one another, and the digital space as a site of racialized and gendered violence. Through an expansive approach to the study of connectivity, Digital Encounters illustrates how new connections - between analog and digital, human and machine, print text and pixel - alter representations of self, Other, and world.

Examining the ways in which modernism is created within specific historical contexts, as well as how it redefines the concept of history itself, this book sheds new light on the historical-mindedness of modernism and the artistic avant-gardes. Cutting across Anglophone and less explored European traditions and featuring work from a variety of eminent scholars, it deals with issues as diverse as artistic medium, modernist print culture, autobiography as history writing, avant-garde experimentations and modernism's futurity. Contributors examine both literary and artistic modernism, combining theoretical overviews and archival research with case studies of Anglophone as well as European modernism, which speak to the current historicizing trend in modernist and literary studies.

This co-edited volume offers new insights into the complex relations between Brussels and Vienna in the turn-of-the-century period (1880-1930). Through archival research and critical methods of cultural transfer as a network, it contributes to the study of Modernism in all its complexity. Seventeen chapters analyse the interconnections between new developments in literature (Verhaeren, Musil, Zweig), drama (Maeterlinck, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), visual arts (Minne, Khnopff, Masereel, Child Art), architecture (Hoffmann, Van de Velde), music (Schoenberg, Ysaye, Kreisler, Kolisch), as well as psychoanalysis (Varendonck, Anna Freud) and cafe culture. Austrian and Belgian artists played a crucial role within the complex, rich, and conflictual international networks of people, practices, institutions, and metropoles in an era of political, social and technological change and intense internationalization. Contributors: Sylvie Arlaud, Norbert Bachleitner, Anke Bosse, Megan Brandow-Faller, Alexander Carpenter, Piet Defraeye, Clement Dessy, Aniel Guxholli, Birgit Lang, Helga Mitterbauer, Chris Reyns-Chikuma, Silvia Ritz, Hubert Roland, Inga Rossi-Schrimpf, Sigurd Paul Scheichl, Guillaume Tardif, Hans Vandevoorde.

Through readings of Ishiguro's repurposing of key elements of realism and modernism; his interest in childhood imagination and sketching; interrogation of aesthetics and ethics; his fascination with architecture and the absent home; and his expressionist use of 'imaginary' space and place, Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics examines the manner in which Ishiguro's fictions approach, but never quite reveal, the ineffable, inexpressible essence of his narrators' emotionally fraught worlds. Reformulating Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the 'essence of world can only be indicated' as 'the essence of world can only be gestured towards,' Sloane argues that while Ishiguro's novels and short stories are profoundly sensitive to the limitations of literary form, their narrators are, to varying degrees, equally keenly attuned to the failures of language itself. In order to communicate something of the emotional worlds of characters adrift in various uncertainties, while also commenting on the expressive possibilities of fiction and the mimetic arts more widely, Ishiguro appropriates a range of metaphors which enable both author and character to gesture towards the undisclosable essences of fiction and being.

Altered states of consciousness - including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence - can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood. Unselfing explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss. Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.

From Allen Ginsberg's 'angel-headed hipsters' to angelic outlaws in Essex Hemphill's Conditions, angelic imagery is pervasive in queer American art and culture. This book examines how the period after 1945 expanded a unique mixture of sacred and profane angelic imagery in American literature and culture to fashion queer characters, primarily gay men, as embodiments of 'bad beatitudes'. Deutsch explores how authors across diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, including John Rechy, Richard Bruce Nugent, Allen Ginsberg, and Rabih Alameddine, sought to find the sacred in the profane and the profane in the sacred. Exploring how these writers used the trope of angelic outlaws to celebrate men who rebelled wilfully and nobly against religious, medical, legal and social repression in American society, this book sheds new light on dissent and queer identities in postmodern American literature.

Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the Twenty-First Century anthologizes contemporary stories, comics, and visual texts that intervene in a range of ways to challenge the popular perception of fairy tales as narratives offering heteronormative happy endings that support status-quo values. The materials collected in Inviting Interruptions address the many ways intersectional issues play out in terms of identity markers, such as race, ethnicity, class, and disability, and the forces that affect identity, such as non-normative sexualities, addiction, abuses of power, and forms of internalized self-hatred caused by any number of external pressures. But we also find celebration, whimsy, and beauty in these same texts-qualities intended to extend readers' enjoyment of and pleasure in the genre. Edited by Cristina Bacchilega and Jennifer Orme, the book is organized in two sections. ""Inviting Interruptions"" considers the invitation as an offer that must be accepted in order to participate, whether for good or ill. This section includes Emma Donoghue's literary retelling of ""Hansel and Gretel,"" stills from David Kaplan's short Little Red Riding Hood film, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada's story about stories rooted in Hawaiian tradition and land, and Shary Boyle, Shaun Tan, and Dan Taulapapa McMullin's interruptions of mainstream images of beauty-webs, commerce, and Natives. ""Interrupting Invitations"" contemplates the interruption as a survival mechanism to end a problem that has already been going on too long. This section includes reflections on migration and sexuality by Diriye Osman, Sofia Samatar, and Nalo Hopkinson; and invitations to rethink human and non-human relations in works by Anne Kamiya, Rosario Ferr? (R), Veronica Schanoes, and Susanna Clark. Each text in the book is accompanied by an editors' note, which offers questions, critical resources, and other links for expanding the appreciation and resonance of the text. As we make our way deeper into the twenty-first century, wonder tales-and their critical analyses-will continue to interest and enchant general audiences, students, and scholars.

The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary tradition. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

Marilynne Robinson, Theologian of the Ordinary posits that Robinson's widely celebrated novels and essays are best understood as emerging from a foundational theology that has 'the Ordinary' as its source. Reading Robinson's published work, and drawing on an original interview with Robinson, Andrew Cunning constructs an authentically Robinsonian theology that is at once distinctly American and conversant with contemporary continental philosophy of religion. This book demonstrates that the Ordinary is the source of Robinson's writing and, as a phenomenon that opens onto a surplus of meaning, is where Robinson's notion of transcendence emerges. Robinson's theology is one centered on the material reality of the world and on the subjective nature of one's encounter with oneself and the physical stuff of existence. Arguing that the Ordinary demands an artistic response, this book reads Robinson's fiction as her theological response to the surplus of meaning in ordinary experience. Under the themes of grace, language, time and self, Cunning locates the ordinary, everyday grounding of Robinson's metaphysics.

Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and the Modernist Novel is a study of the novel and consciousness in James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. This volume focuses on novels of the 1920s and engages in a study of Joyce's epiphany and language play, Yeats's esoteric philosophy, Lawrence's vitalism, and Woolf's stream of consciousness techniques. In this book readers enter the minds of Joyce's characters Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in the modern city, the esoteric quests of William Butler Yeats, the vitalism and explorations of D. H. Lawrence, the interiority of Virginia Woolf, and the artistic perspectives of the Bloomsbury Group. Within the field of intellectual history, Robert McParland's groundbreaking study places Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, and Woolf within the cultural and historical context of the first half of the twentieth century. McParland takes a philosophical humanist approach to the innovative techniques and quests of literary modernism and draws from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the inquiries of Arthur Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson. This work also follows from the work of intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes, the studies of James Joyce by Richard Ellmann and Helene Cixous, and David Lodge's Consciousness in Fiction.

"This book was crying out to be written." The Irish Times "Scandalously readable." Literary Review James Joyce's relationship with his homeland was a complicated and often vexed one. The publication of his masterwork Ulysses - referred to by The Quarterly Review as an "Odyssey of the sewer" - in 1922 was initially met with indifference and hostility within Ireland. This book tells the full story of the reception of Joyce and his best-known book in the country of his birth for the first time; a reception that evolved over the next hundred years, elevating Joyce from a writer reviled to one revered. Part reception study, part social history, this book uses the changing interpretations of Ulysses to explore the concurrent religious, social and political changes sweeping Ireland. From initially being a threat to the status quo, Ulysses became a way to market Ireland abroad and a manifesto for a better, more modern, open and tolerant, multi-ethnic country.

David Mikics has been hailed by Harold Bloom as one of our finest literary critics. In this fresh and revealing book, he examines Saul Bellow's work through the real-life relationships and friendships that Bellow transmuted into the genius of his art. The book is divided into eight chapters on some of the extraordinary people who mattered most to Bellow-family members like his irascible brother Morrie; friends like the novelists and critics Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom; and wives and lovers. Bellow's People is a perfect introduction to Bellow's life and work and an incisive study of the art of literature. As Mikics argues, "Bellow is our novelist of personality in all its wrinkles, its glories and shortcomings. Only through personality, he tells us, can we know the world."

Thomas Pynchon's style has dazzled and bewildered readers and critics since the 1960s, and this book employs computational methods from the digital humanities to reveal heretofore unknown stylistic trends over the course of Pynchon's career, as well as challenge critical assumptions regarding foregrounded and supposedly "Pynchonesque" stylistic features: ambiguity/vagueness, acronyms, ellipsis marks, profanity, and archaic stylistics in Mason & Dixon. As the first book-length stylistic or computational stylistic examination of Pynchon's oeuvre, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities provides a groundwork of stylistic experiments and interpretations, with over 60 graphs and tables, presented in a manner in which both technical and non-technical audiences may follow.

Alice Pleasance Liddell inspired what is considered today to be the greatest children's story of all time - Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland brought Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll together forever. The story behind this story is a dramatic saga of a very creative, curious, and magnetic young girl who grew up to become a cultural icon and one of the most celebrated women of the last 100 years. It is a story of love, tragedy, duty, courage and loyalty to family and country - that will surprise and deeply move you.
In 2006, award-winning author C.M. Rubin and her daughter, Gabriella Rubin (who are related to the Liddell family), began an incredible journey to create the ultimate book about the original Alice in Wonderland's life. Their grand pictorial, biographic vision for the book involved collecting photographs spanning two centuries, reaching out to many celebrated Alice in Wonderland artists (including Vik Muniz, Annie Liebovitz, Mark Steele, Lizzy Rockwell, Helen Oxenbury, Frances Broomfield, Jeanne Argent, David Cooper, Bruce Fuller, Tatiana Ianovskaia, Jewel, and Tom Otterness), and connecting with museums, libraries and schools around the world. The Real Alice in Wonderland book is told using never before seen pictures along with prominent voices from Alice's lifetime and from the present day. C.M. Rubin and her daughter Gabriella explore the theme of inspiration. Behind every great person there is the person who inspires and believes in him or her. The person who motivates them to realize their dreams. This magnificent cross-atlantic epic will fascinate you -- it will make you think again: what does it mean to inspire?
The Real Alice In Wonderland book is dedicated to all those who inspire the minds and souls of human beings.

Framing Gotham City as a microcosm of a modern-day metropolis, Gotham City Living posits this fictional setting as a hyper-aware archetype, demonstrative of the social, political and cultural tensions felt throughout urban America. Looking at the comics, graphic novels, films and television shows that form the Batman universe, this book demonstrates how the various creators of Gotham City have imagined a geography for the condition of America, the cast of characters acting as catalysts for a revaluation of established urban values. McCrystal breaks down representations of the city and its inhabitants into key sociological themes, focusing on youth, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, class disparity and criminality. Surveying comic strip publications from the mid-20th century to modern depictions, this book explores a wide range of material from the universe as well as the most contemporary depictions of the caped crusader not yet fully addressed in a scholarly context. These include the works of Tom King and Gail Simone; the films by Christopher Nolan and Tim Burton; and the Batman animated series and Gotham television shows. Covering characters from Batman and Robin to Batgirl, Catwoman and Poison Ivy, Gotham City Living examines the Batman franchise as it has evolved, demonstrating how the city presents a timeline of social progression (and regression) in urban American society.

As a white woman of means living in segregated Georgia in the first half of the twentieth century, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) surprised readers with stories of mixed-race love affairs, mob attacks on "outsiders," and young female campers exploring their sexuality. Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith tracks the evolution of Smith from a young girls' camp director into a courageous artist who could examine controversial topics frankly and critically while preserving a lifelong connection to the north Georgia mountains and people. She did not pull punches in her portrayals of the South and refused to obsess on an idealized past. Smith took seriously the artist's role as she saw it-to lead readers toward a better understanding of themselves and a more fulfilling existence. Smith's perspective cut straight to the core of the neurotic behaviors she observed and participated in. To draw readers into her exploration of those behaviors, she created compelling stories, using carefully chosen literary techniques in powerful ways. With words as her medium, she drew maps of her fictionalized southern places, revealing literally and metaphorically society's disfunctions. Through carefully crafted points of view, she offers readers an intimate glimpse into her own childhood as well as the psychological traumas that all southerners experience and help to perpetuate. Comprised of seven essays by contemporary Smith scholars, this volume explores these fascinating aspects of Smith's writings in an attempt to fill in the picture of this charismatic figure, whose work not only was influential in her time but also is profoundly relevant to ours. Contributions by Tanya Long Bennett, David Brauer, Cameron Williams Crawford, Emily Pierce Cummins, April Conley Kilinski, Justin Mellette, and Wendy Kurant Rollins.

Featured on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading List For over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of scifi to utopian studies, formalist and leftist critical theory, and his broader engagement with what he terms "political epistemology." Disputing the Deluge joins a rapidly growing renewal of critical interest in Suvin's work on scifi and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 24 of Suvin's most significant interventions in the field from the 21st century, with an Introduction by editor Hugh O'Connell and a new preface by the author. Beginning with writings from the early 2000s that investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here--each a brilliant example of engaged thought--highlight the value of scifi for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin's interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008 economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the decline of democracy. By bringing together Suvin's essays all in one place, this collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.

In this selective overview of scholarship generated by The Hunger Games-the young adult dystopian fiction and film series which has won popular and critical acclaim-Zhange Ni showcases various investigations into the entanglement of religion and the arts in the new millennium. Ni introduces theories, methods, and the latest developments in the study of religion in relation to politics, audio/visual art, new media, material culture, and popular culture, whilst also reading The Hunger Games as a story that explores the variety, complexity, and ambiguity of enchantment. In popular texts such as this, religion and art-both broadly construed, that is, beyond conventional boundaries-converge in creating an enchantment that makes life more bearable and effects change in the world.

Britain's vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society - from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives - that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath. Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.