Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts offers a sustained academic critique of Ayn Rand's works and her wider Objectivist philosophy. While Rand's texts are often dismissed out of hand by those hostile to the ideology promoted within them, these essays argue instead that they need to be taken seriously and analysed in detail. Rand's influential worldview does not tolerate uncertainty, relying as it does upon a notion of truth untroubled by doubt. In contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that any progressive response to Rand should resist the dubious comforts of a position of ethical or aesthetic purity, even as they challenge the reductive individualistic ideology promoted within her writing. Drawing on a range of sources and approaches from Psychoanalysis to The Gold Standard and from Hannah Arendt to Spiderman, these essays consider Rand's works in the context of wider political, economic, and philosophical debates.

Looking at the work of Latino/a authors who are U.S. citizens, including Junot Diaz, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, Marta Caminero- Santangelo examines how writers are increasingly expressing their solidarity with undocumented immigrants. She similarly foregrounds the narratives of the undocumented themselves to show how they are emerging in the public sphere. In this multifaceted issue, the voices are myriad: they challenge common interpretations of "illegal" immigration, explore the inevitable traumas and ethical dilemmas, protest their own silencing in immigration debates, and even capitalize on the topic for the commercial market. This growing body of literature is critical to understanding not only the Latino/a immigrant experience, but also alternative visions of nation and belonging.

A rich examination of the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James JoyceIn this book, Fran O'Rourke examines the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce, arguing that both thinkers fundamentally shaped the philosophical outlook which pervades the author's oeuvre. O'Rourke demonstrates that Joyce was a philosophical writer who engaged creatively with questions of diversity and unity, identity, permanence and change, and the reliability of knowledge. Beginning with an introduction to each thinker, the book traces Joyce's discovery of their works and his concrete engagement with their thought. Aristotle and Aquinas equipped Joyce with fundamental principles regarding reality, knowledge, and the soul, which allowed him to shape his literary characters. Joyce appropriated Thomistic concepts to elaborate an original and personal aesthetic theory. O'Rourke provides an annotated commentary on quotations from Aristotle which Joyce entered into his famous Early Commonplace Book and outlines their crucial significance for his writings. He also provides an authoritative evaluation of Joyce's application of Aquinas's aesthetic principles. The first book to comprehensively illuminate the profound impact of both the ancient and medieval thinker on the modernist writer, Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas offers readers a rich understanding of the intellectual background and philosophical underpinnings of Joyce's work.

The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka examines the full length of Baraka's discography as a poet recording with musicians as well as his contributions to jazz and R & B, beginning with his earliest studio recordings in 1965 and continuing to the last year of his life, 2014. This recorded history traces his evolution from the era of Beat poetry and "projective verse," through the period of the Black Arts Movement and cultural nationalism, and on to his commitments to "third world Marxism," which characterized the last decades of his life. The music enfolding Baraka's recitations ranges from traditional African drumming, to doo wop, rhythm and blues, soul and the avant garde jazz that was his great love and the subject of so much of his writing, and includes both in-studio sessions and live concert performances. This body of work offers a rare opportunity to think about not only jazz/poetry, but the poet in the recording studio and the relations of text to score.

Joan Didion (b. 1934) is an American icon. Her essays, particularly those in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, have resonated in American culture to a degree unmatched over the past half century. Two generations of writers have taken her as the measure of what it means to write personal essays. No one writes about California, the sixties, media narratives, cultural mythology, or migraines without taking Didion into account. She has also written five novels; several screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne; and three late-in-life memoirs, including The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, which have brought her a new wave of renown. Conversations with Joan Didion features seventeen interviews with the author spanning decades, continents, and genres. Didion reflects on her childhood in Sacramento; her time at Berkeley (both as a student and later as a visiting professor), New York, and Hollywood; her marriage to Dunne; and of course her writing. Didion describes her methods of writing, the ways in which the various genres she has worked in inform one another, and the concerns that have motivated her to write.

In this book - one of the first ecocritical explorations of Irish literature - Alison Lacivita defies the popular view of James Joyce as a thoroughly urban writer by bringing to light his consistent engagement with nature. Using genetic criticism to investigate Joyce's source texts, notebooks, and proofs, Lacivita shows how Joyce developed ecological themes in Finnegans Wake over successive drafts. Making apparent a love of growing things and a lively connection with the natural world across his texts, Lacivita's approach reveals Joyce's keen attention to the Irish landscape, meteorology, urban planning, Dublin's ecology, the exploitation of nature, and fertilityand reproduction. Lacivita unearths a vital quality of Joyce's work that has largely gone undetected, decisively aligning ecocriticism with both modernism and Irish studies.

Despite the recent turn to affects and emotions in the humanities and despite the unceasing popularity of romantic and erotic love as a motif in fictional works of all genres, the subject has received surprisingly little attention in academic studies of contemporary drama. Love in Contemporary British Drama reflects the appeal of love as a topic and driving force in dramatic works with in-depth analyses of eight pivotal plays from the past three decades. Following an interdisciplinary and historical approach, the study collects and condenses theories of love from philosophy and sociology to derive persisting discourses and to examine their reoccurrence and transformation in contemporary plays. Special emphasis is put on narratives of love's compensatory function and precariousness and on how modifications of these narratives epitomise the peculiarities of emotional life in the social and cultural context of the present. Based on the assumption that drama is especially inclined to draw on shared narratives for representations of love, the book demonstrates that love is both a window to remnants of the past in the present and a proper subject matter for drama in times in which the suitability of the dramatic form has been questioned.

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese writer to be so lauded for his prose and plays. Since relocating to France in 1987, in a voluntary exile from China, he has assembled a body of dramatic work that has best been understood neither as expressly Chinese nor French, but as transnational. In this comprehensive study of his post-exile plays, Mary Mazzilli explores Gao's plays as examples of postdramatic transnationalism: a transnational artistic and theatrical trend that is fluid, flexible and encompasses a variety of styles and influences. As such, this innovative interdisciplinary investigation offers fresh insights into contemporary theatre. Whereas other publications have considered Gao's work as a cultural and artistic phenomenon, Gao Xingjian's Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre is the first study to relate his plays to postdramatic theatre and to provide close textual and dramatic analysis that will help readers to better understand his complex work, and also to see it in the context of the work of contemporary playwrights such as Martin Crimp, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek. Among the plays discussed are: The Other Shore, written just before he left China in 1987; Between Life and Death (1991) - compared in detail to Martin Crimp's Attempts on her life; Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), and its relationship to Beckett's Happy Days; Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), Weekend Quartet (1995), and the latest plays Snow in August (1997), Death Collector (2000) and Ballade Nocturne (2010).

Why did so many citizens of the GDR agree to collaborate with the Stasi? Reading works of literature since German unification in the light of previously unseen files from the archives of the Stasi, After the Stasi uncovers how writers to the present day have explored collaboration as a challenge to the sovereignty of subjectivity. Annie Ring here interweaves close analysis of literary fiction and life-writing by former Stasi spies and victims with documents from the archive, new readings from literary modernism and cultural theories of the self. In its pursuit of the strange power of the Stasi, the book introduces an archetypal character in the writing of German unification: one who is not sovereign over her or his actions, but instead is compelled by an imperative to collaborate - an imperative that persists in new forms in the post-Cold War age. Ring's study identifies a monumental historical shift after 1989, from a collaboration that took place in concert with others, in a manner that could be recorded in the archive, to the more isolated and ultimately less accountable complicities of the capitalist present. While considering this shift in the most recent texts by East German writers, Ring provocatively suggests that their accounts of collaboration under the Stasi, and of the less-than-sovereign subjectivity to which it attests, remain urgent for understanding the complicities to which we continue to consent in the present day.

Building on insights from the fields of textual criticism, bibliography, narratology, authorship studies, and book history, The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century examines the role that prefaces played in the development of professional authorship in America. Many of the prefaces written by American writers in the twentieth century catalogue the shifting landscape of a more self-consciously professionalized trade, one fraught with tension and compromise, and influenced by evolving reading publics. With analyses of Willa Cather, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Toni Morrison, Ross K. Tangedal argues that writers used prefaces as a means of expanding and complicating authority over their work and, ultimately, as a way to write about their careers. Tangedal's approach offers a new way of examining American writers in the evolving literary marketplace of the twentieth century.

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the "spatial turn," contributors from disciplines ranging from geography and history to literary and media studies theorize narrative constructions of the city and cities, and analyze relevant examples from a variety of discourses, media, and cities. Subdivided into six sections, the book explores the interactions of city and text-as well as other media-and the conflicting narratives that arise in these interactions. Offering case studies that discuss specific aspects of the narrative construction of Berlin and London, the text also considers narratives of urban discontinuity and their theoretical implications. Ultimately, this volume captures the narratological, artistic, material, social, and performative possibilities inherent in spatial representations of the city.

"Kafka and Cultural Zionism" is an illumination of the individual Jewish identity of this major modernist German author. Through a thorough examination of Kafka's life, his influences, and his writings, Iris Bruce makes a case for Kafka's interest in Zionism and demonstrates the presence of Jewish themes and motifs in Kafka's literary works. In recognizing this essential part of Kafka's individual voice, Bruce hopes to provide a new perspective on Kafka and his writings that allows the reader to find the humor, playfulness, rebelliousness, and challenge that can be overlooked if the reader expects to find a Kafka who is disengaged from his ethnic and cultural identity, as well as the politics of his age. Outstanding Academic Title, "Choice Magazine"

This is a concise and authoritative guide to Virginia Woolf's classic text "To the Lighthouse" (1927), including a brief plot summary and introduction to characters and a guide to critical reception. "To the Lighthouse" is one of Virginia Woolf's most widely read and commonly studied novels. Offering an authoritative, up-to-date guide for students, this guide introduces its context, language, themes, criticism and afterlife, leading students to a more sophisticated understanding of the text. It is the ideal companion to reading and studying the novel, setting "To the Lighthouse" in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, providing exemplary close readings, presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception. The book also includes a brief plot summary and guide to characters to enable students to progress quickly from early concerns about what is happening in the novel. It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading. "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Under what conditions does 'sensation' become 'sensational'? In the early nineteenth century murder was a staple of the sensationalizing popular press and gruesome descriptions were deployed to make a direct impact on the sensations of the reader. By the end of the century, public concern with the thrills, spills, and shocks of modern life was increasingly articulated in the language of sensation. Media sensationalism contributed to this process and magnified its impact, just as sensation was, in turn, taken up by literature, art and film. In the contemporary world the dramatization of these experiences in an era of media panics over terrorism and paedophilia has taken an overtly melodramatic form, in which battles of good and evil play out across the landscapes of our lives. Sensational Subjects develops an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to exploring these themes, their impact and their implications for understanding the modern world. A companion volume, Sympathetic Sentiments: Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World is published simultaneously by Bloomsbury.

In Irish fiction, the most famous example of the embrace of damnation in order to gain freedom-politically, religiously, and creatively-is Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. His "non serviam," though, is not just the profound rebellion of one frustrated young man, but, as Brivic demonstrates in this sweeping account of twentieth-century Irish fiction, the emblematic and necessary standpoint for any artist wishing to envision something truly new. Because Irish culture was largely dictated by the Catholic Church and its conservatism, the most ambitious Irish writers, like Joyce, Beckett, and the ten others Brivic presents here, saw the privileges of damnation and seized them, rejecting powerful norms of church, state, and culture, as well as of literary form, voice, and character, to produce some of the most radical work of the twentieth century. Brivic links the work of writers such as Flann O'Brien, Patrick McCabe, and Anne Enright to the theories of Alain Badiou. His mathematical procedure for distinguishing what is truly innovative informs the progressive political and philosophical thrust that these writers at their best carry on from Joyceand Beckett to unfold a fierce tradition that extends into the twenty-first century.

U.S. Latinx Literature in Spanish remains an understudied field despite its large and vibrant corpus. This is partly due to the erroneous impression that this literature is only written in English, and partly due to traditional educational programs focusing on English texts to include non-Spanish speakers and non-Latinx students. This has created a vacuum in research about Latinx literary production in Spanish, leaving the contemporary field wide open for exploration. This volume fills this space by bringing contemporary U.S. Latinx literature in Spanish to the forefront of the field. The essays focus on literary production post-1960 and examine texts by authors from different backgrounds writing from the U.S., providing readers with an opportunity to explore new texts in Spanish within U.S. Latinx literature, and a departure point for starting a meaningful critical discourse about what it means to write and publish in Spanish in the U.S. Through exploring literary production in a language that is both emotionally and politically charged for authors, the academia, and the U.S., this book challenges and enhances our understanding of the term 'Americas'.

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays gathered here explore how literary and cultural texts have represented and responded to the global food system from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Covering topics such as the impact of colonial monocultures and industrial agriculture, enclosure and the loss of the commons, the meatification of diets, the toxification of landscapes, and the consequences of climate breakdown, the volume ranges across the globe, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean. Whether it is anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain, labour struggles on Guatemalan banana plantations, or food dependency in Puerto Rico, the contributors to this volume show how fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music have critically explored and contributed to food cultures worldwide.

This book examines the modes of representation of the East in Argentinean literature since the country's independence, in works by canonical authors such as Esteban Echeverria, Juan B. Alberdi, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Lucio V. Mansilla, Pastor S. Obligado, Eduardo F. Wilde, Leopoldo Lugones, and Roberto Arlt. The East, which has always fascinated intellectuals and artists from the Americas, inspired the creation of imaginary elements for both aesthetic and political purposes, from the depiction of purportedly despotic rulers to a genuine admiration for Eastern history and millennial cultures. These writers appropriated the East either through their travels or by reading chronicles, integrating along the way images that would end up being universalized by the Argentinean dichotomy between civilization and barbarism, all the while assigning the negative stereotypes of the exotic East to the Pampa region. With time, the exoticism of the Eastern world would shed its geopolitical meaning and was ultimately integrated into the national literature, thus adding new elements into the Argentinean imaginary.

How does a writer approach a novel about a real person? In this new collection of interviews, authors such as Emma Donoghue, David Ebershoff, David Lodge, Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, and Olga Tokarczuk sit down with literary scholars to discuss the relationship of history, truth, and fiction. Taken together, these conversations clarify how the biographical novel encourages cross-cultural dialogue, promotes new ways of thinking about history, politics, and social justice, and allows us to journey into the interior world of influential and remarkable people.

This book presents the extraordinary life and writings of Maya Angelou. It examines the changing viewpoints in her six autobiographies within the context of women's and African American autobiographies, with specific reference to the slave narrative and to contemporary fiction and film. Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self examines this iconic artist's work as an autobiographer, offering an up-to-date assessment of Angelou's contributions to American literature and to American and international culture. This is the only book to interpret Angelou's autobiographies as unique experiments in the history of black narrative. It attests to Angelou's creativity in transforming the typical single-volume autobiography into a six-volume personal and cultural adventure that tells the truth but reads like fiction. The narratives cover the years from the Great Depression (1941) to the days following the assassinations of Malcolm X (1965) and Martin Luther King (1968), emphasizing Angelou's roles as mother, daughter, granddaughter, wife, and friend. This revised edition also presents information about Maya Angelou's funeral and her continuing legacy since her death in 2014. The depth and scope of the book's observations regarding Angelou's autobiographies will be of great interest to readers seeking an analysis of the interconnections among Angelou's writings as well as serve students taking courses in women's studies or black culture studies. Examines each of Maya Angelou's six autobiographies, enabling readers to understand what growing up black and female in the United States was like Traces the development of black autobiography from its roots in the slave narrative to its presence in contemporary fiction and film Highlights the exclusive 1997 interview between Maya Angelou and the author Examines Maya Angelou's achievements as a poet Discusses all of Angelou's autobiographies regarding their settings, themes, plot development, and other narrative techniques Offers an alternate reading for each autobiography

This book traces how The Walking Dead franchise narratively, visually, and rhetorically represents transgressions against heteronormativity and the nuclear family. The introduction argues that The Walking Dead reflects cultural anxiety over threats to the family. Chapter 1 examines the destructive competition created by heteronormativity, such as the conflict between Rick and Shane. Chapter 2 focuses on the actual or attempted participation of characters such as Carol and Negan in queer relationships. Chapter 3 interprets zombies as queer antagonists to heteronormativity, while Chapter 4 explores the incorporation of zombies into the lives of characters such as the Governor and the Whisperers. The conclusion asserts that The Walking Dead presents both queer alternatives to and damaging contradictions within the traditional heterosexual family model, helping to question this model and to consider the struggle of queer American families. Overall, this study holds special interest for students and scholars of queerness, zombies, and the family.

Robin Jenkins's greatest novel is a powerful examination of good and evil, set against the backdrop of a Scottish estate during World War II. With its themes of class-conflict, war, evil and envy, this is a towering work of fiction that remains as relevant today as when it was first published. Suspenseful, dark and unforgettable, it is one of the masterpieces of modern Scottish literature. Iain Crichton Smith's SCOTNOTE study guide is a skilful and intelligent guide to the themes and characters of the novel, and explores the religious, philosophical and moral questions that it poses. Suitable for senior school pupils and students of all ages.

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media studies the performative nature of evil characters, acts and emotions across intersecting genres, disciplines and historical eras. This collection brings together scholars and artists with different institutional standings, cultural backgrounds and (inter)disciplinary interests with the aim of energizing the ongoing discussion of the generic and thematic issues related to the representation of villainy and evil in literature and media. The volume covers medieval literature to contemporary literature and also examines important aspects of evil in literature such as social and political identity, the gothic and systemic evil practices. In addition to literature, the book considers examples of villainy in film, TV and media, revealing that performance, performative control and maneuverability are the common characteristics of villains across the different literary and filmic genres and eras studied in the volume.