Die eerste uitgawe van Die keer toe ek my naam vergeet het verskyn in 1995, vyf jaar nadat die skrywer F.A. Venter ’n beroerte gekry het. In hierdie outobiografiese vertelling dokumenteer hy die pynlike en stadige proses van herstel: hy moet weer leer loop, leer praat, leer skryf. Dit is verder ’n verhaal oor die verhouding tussen Venter en sy geliefde vrou, Stella. In Die Afrikaanse literatuur 1652–2004 beskryf J.C. Kannemeyer Die keer toe ek my naam vergeet het as een van Venter se “belangrikste bydraes tot die Afrikaanse prosa”: “Die aangrypende verhaal van ouderdom en lyding, maar ook van ’n mooi huwelik en toegewyde liefde, is terselfdertyd ’n getuienis van die onblusbare gees van die skeppende mens wat, ten spyte van alle teenspoed, kan voortgaan met die werk waarvoor hy hier op aarde geplaas is.” Op ’n eerlike en roerende wyse, en met ’n tikkie humor, raak Venter die universele, tydlose temas van siekte, oudword en die dood aan. Uiteindelik is dit ’n verhaal van aanvaarding: “Ek het baie verloor – die kosbaarste. Maar ek het ook geleer om te verduur. Te aanvaar. Tevrede te wees. Anders sou dit ondraaglik wees.”

Thomas Hardy's reputation as a poet is higher now than it has ever been. It is generally agreed that the Poems of 1912-13, written in memory of his first wife, are some of the greatest elegies in the language. This invaluable new study concentrates on the 'Emma Poems', setting them in the context of Hardy's troubled first marriage, then analysing them one by one. John Greening - a poet himself and author of the Greenwich Exchange Guides to Poets of the First World War and W.B. Yeats - highlights the distinctive music of this twenty-one poem 'suite', while exploring the sexual and spiritual tensions concealed witihn Hardy's Dorsetshire and North Cornish landscapes.

Exploring the potential of poetry and poetic language as a means of conveying perspectives on ageing and later life, this book examines questions such as 'how can we understand ageing and later life?' and 'how can we capture the ambiguities and complexities that the experiences of growing old in time and place entail?' As poetic language illuminates, transfigures and enchants our being in the world, it also offers insights into the existential questions that are amplified as we age, including the vulnerabilities and losses that humble us and connect us. Literary gerontology and narrative gerontology have highlighted the importance of linguistic representations of ageing. While the former has been concerned primarily with the analysis of published literary works, the latter has foregrounded the individual and collective meaning making through narrative resources in old age. There has, however, been less interest in how poetic language, both as a genre and as a practice, can illuminate ageing. This volume suggests a path towards the poetics of ageing by means of presenting analyses of published poetry on ageing written by poets from William Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens; the use of reading and writing poetry among ordinary people in old age; and the poetic nuances that emerge from other literary practices and contexts in relation to ageing - including personal poetic reflections from many of the contributing authors. The volume brings together international scholars from disciplinary backgrounds as diverse as cultural psychology, literary studies, theology, sociology, narrative medicine, cultural gerontology and narrative gerontology, and will deploy a variety of empirical and critical methodologies to explore how poetry and poetic language may challenge dominant discourses and illuminate alternative understandings of ageing.

Mining the borderlands where history meets literature in Britain and Europe as well as America, this book shows how the imminence and outbreak of World War II ignited the imaginations of writers ranging from Ernest Hemingway, W.H. Auden, and James Joyce to Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, and Irene Nemirovsky. Taking its cue from Percy Shelley's dictum that great writers are to some extent created by the age in which they live, this book shows how much the politics and warfare of the years from 1939 to 1941 drove the literature of this period. Its novels, poems, and plays differ radically from histories of World War II because-besides being works of imagination-- they are largely products of a particular stage in the author's life as well as of a time at which no one knew how the war would end. This is the first comprehensive study of the impact of the outbreak of the Second World War on the literary work of American, English, and European writers during its first years.

L.M.Montgomery grew up in Prince Edward Island, a real place of "politics and potatoes." But it's her fictional island, a richly textured imaginative landscape that has captivated a world of readers since 1908, when Anne of Green Gables became the first of Montgomery's long string of bestsellers. In this wide-ranging and highly readable book, Elizabeth Waterston uses the term "magic" to suggest that peculiar, indefinable combination of attributes that unpredictably results in creative genius. Montgomery's intelligence, her drive, and her sense of humour are essential components of this success. Waterston also features what Montgomery called her "dream life," a "strange inner life of fancy which had always existed side by side with my outer life." This special ability to look beyond the veil, to access vibrant inner vistas, produced deceptively layered fictions out of a life that saw not just its share of both fame and ill fortune, but also what Waterston calls "dark passions." A true reader's guide, Magic Island explores the world of L.M. Montgomery in a way never done before. Each chapter of Magic Island discusses a different Montgomery book, following their progression chronologically. Waterston draws parallels between Montgomery's internal "island," her personal life, her professional career, and the characters in her novels. Designed to be read alongside the new biography of Montgomery by Mary Rubio, this is the first book to reinterpret Montgomery's writing in light of important new information about her life. A must-read for any Montgomery fan, Magic Island offers a fresh and insightful look at the world of L.M. Montgomery and the "magic" of artistic creation.

This classic novel of colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), was first published in 1913 and is written by a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, husband of Virginia Woolf. It reads as if Thomas Hardy had been born among the heat, scent, sensuality and pungent mystery of the tropics. Translated into both Tamil and Sinhalese, it is one of the best-loved and best-known stories in Sri Lanka. It includes a new biographical afterword by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, author of "Woolf in Ceylon", and a short story, "Pearls before Swine", which vividly draws on Woolf's experience as a young District Commissioner. This book reeks of first-hand knowledge of the colonial experience, and of its profound, malign disregard for the psychology and culture of its subject peoples.

Mazo de la Roche leaped to prominence as one of the most successful writers of the twentieth century when the first novel in her Whiteoaks of Jalna series won the Atlantic Monthly Prize in 1927. The award was hailed not only as a triumph for Mazo but as marking the coming of age of Canadian literature. Therefore her popularity, which earned her a luxurious life-style that included baronial manors in the English countryside, a retinue of devoted servants, and a fondness for world travel, abated only with her death in 1961. The centre of her life was her overwhelming love for her cousin, Caroline Clement, whom she adopted as a sister and who was her life-long companion, soulmate, and muse. The core of their existence was a secret unwritten play-endlessly changing and growing-that they acted out from the moment they met almost to the end of their lives. In this insightful biography Joan Givner has recovered the hidden life of Mazo de la Roche.

For most of the 20th century, Latin American literature and art have contested political and cultural projects of homogenization of a manifestly diverse continent. Cultural Antagonism and the Crisis of Reality in Twentieth-Century Latin America explores literary and humanist experimentations and questions of gender, race, and ethnicity as well as the contradictions of capitalist development that belie such homogenization by reconfiguring the sense of the real in Latin America. Covering four key geographical areas, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and the Andes, every chapter delves into a question that has been central to the humanities in the last 20 years: Indigenous world-views, gender, race, neo-liberalism and visual culture. Legras illuminates these issues with a thorough consideration of the theoretical questions inherent to how new identities disrupt the imaginary stability of social formations.

Bringing together leading voices from across the globe, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton represents state-of-the-art scholarship on the American writer Edith Wharton, once primarily known as a New York novelist. Focusing on Wharton's extensive body of work and renaissance across 21st-century popular culture, chapters consider: - Wharton in the context of queer studies, race studies, whiteness studies, age studies, disability studies, anthropological studies, and economics; - Wharton's achievements in genres for which she deserves to be better known: poetry, drama, the short story, and non-fiction prose; - Comparative studies with Christina Rossetti, Henry James, and Willa Cather; -The places and cultures Wharton documented in her writing, including France, Greece, Italy, and Morocco; - Wharton's work as a reader and writer and her intersections with film and the digital humanities. Book-ended by Dale Bauer and Elaine Showalter, and with a foreword by the Director and senior staff at The Mount, Wharton's historic Massachusetts home, the Handbook underscores Wharton's lasting impact for our new Gilded Age. It is an indispensable resource for readers interested in Wharton and 19th- and 20th-century literature and culture.

Based on extensive research, this authoritative study places Bukowski's poetry in its American cultural context, and explores the key poems and collections in his development. It traces magazines, literary contacts and influences from the mid-1940s to The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). and Walt Whitman? About how and why Bukowski formed his unique reading style and public image? And about where he fits into West Coast and post war American verse? Although the book takes into account the best of the American and European commentary that currently exists, it also offers an original and intriguingly British point of view, giving special attention to Bukowski's readings during the 1970s and his influence upon the current generation of West Coast Poets.

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.

Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms

Few figures are more respected and quoted internationally than Fintan O'Toole, both as a controversial and provocative political commentator and theatre critic. This extensive collection brings together a wide range of his writings going back to 1980. It provides a privileged insight into the great moments of contemporary Irish theatre, marking the contributions of playwrights (Carr, Murphy, Friel, McGuinness), directors (Hynes, Byrne), actors (Hickey, McKenna), and designers (Vanek, Frawley). It also demonstrates his unsettling of the usual "canon," with his thoughtful arguments promoting certain playwrights who deserve to up be there with Ireland's best, including Antoine O'Flatharta, Paul Mercier, Dermot Bolger, and David Byrne.

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.

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.

Key Features: * Study methods * Introduction to the text * Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches * Chronology * Glossary of literary terms

A fascinating look at the remarkable life of Barbara Taylor Bradford, bestselling author of the unforgettable A Woman of Substance From the cobbled streets of Yorkshire to the sweeping avenues of Manhattan, Barbara's own story is as dramatic a tale as any one of her bestsellers. Barbara Taylor Bradford's rise to fame and fortune was a difficult one. But from an early age her mother marked her out for glory - at any cost. The drive and ambition instilled in Barbara were to reap huge rewards. From humble beginnings in Yorkshire she took London's Fleet Street by storm. And then, with the creation of Emma Harte, the unforgettable heroine of her first novel A Woman of Substance, she inspired women the world over - and became one of the world's bestselling authors. This is the first time that Barbara Taylor Bradford has been involved in a memoir of any kind and this unique collaboration has produced an extraordinary story. For Emma Harte's rise from Edwardian kitchen maid, single and pregnant, to one of the richest women in the world uncannily mirrors Barbara's own family history - something which was as much of a shock to Barbara as it will be to her millions of fans... Don't miss this incredible story of suffering, loss and triumph over adversity, a must-read for any A Woman of Substance fan.

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.

Teenager Alan, fought over by a religious mother and an atheist father, finds release in horses, until he is driven to blind them with a spike. Why? While treating the boy, a psychiatrist discovers his own life is paradoxically in the witness box.

Benjamin Zephaniah, who has travelled the world for his art and his humanitarianism, now tells the one story that encompasses it all: the story of his life. In the early 1980s when punks and Rastas were on the streets protesting about unemployment, homelessness and the National Front, Benjamin's poetry could be heard at demonstrations, outside police stations and on the dance floor. His mission was to take poetry everywhere, and to popularise it by reaching people who didn't read books. His poetry was political, musical, radical and relevant. By the early 1990s, Benjamin had performed on every continent in the world (a feat which he achieved in only one year) and he hasn't stopped performing and touring since. Nelson Mandela, after hearing Benjamin's tribute to him while he was in prison, requested an introduction to the poet that grew into a lifelong relationship, inspiring Benjamin's work with children in South Africa. Benjamin would also go on to be the first artist to record with The Wailers after the death of Bob Marley in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela. The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah is a truly extraordinary life story which celebrates the power of poetry and the importance of pushing boundaries with the arts.

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.

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.

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.