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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > General
The era known as the Thaw (1953-64) was a crucial period in the
history of the Soviet Union. It was a time when the legacies of
Stalinism began to unravel and when brief moments of liberalisation
saw dramatic changes to society. By exploring theatre productions,
plays and cultural debates during the Thaw, this book sheds light
on a society in flux, in which the cultural norms, values and
hierarchies of the previous era were being rethought. Jesse
Gardiner demonstrates that the revival of avant-garde theatre
during the Thaw was part of a broader re-engagement with cultural
forms that had been banned under Stalin. Plays and productions that
had fallen victim to the censor were revived or reinvented, and
their authors and directors rehabilitated alongside waves of others
who had been repressed during the Stalinist purges. At the same
time, new theatre companies and practitioners emerged who
reinterpreted the stylized techniques of the avant-garde for a
post-war generation. This book argues that the revival of
avant-garde theatre was vital in allowing the Soviet public to
reimagine its relationship to state power, the West and its own
past. It permitted the rethinking of attitudes and prejudices, and
led to calls for greater cultural diversity across society.
Playwrights, directors and actors began to work in innovative ways,
seeking out the theatre of the future by re-engaging with the
proscribed forms of the past.
In June 1942, Anne Frank received a red-and-white-checked diary
for her thirteenth birthday, just weeks before she and her family
went into hiding in an Amsterdam attic to escape the Nazis. For two
years, with ever-increasing maturity, Anne crafted a memoir that
has become one of the most compelling documents of modern history.
But Anne Frank's diary, argues Francine Prose, is as much a work of
art as it is a historical record. Through close reading, she
marvels at the teenage Frank's skillfully natural narrative voice,
at her finely tuned dialogue and ability to turn living people into
characters.
Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife tells the
extraordinary story of the book that became a force in the world.
Along the way, Prose definitively establishes that Anne Frank was
not an accidental author or a casual teenage chronicler but a
writer of prodigious talent and ambition.
This book provides an analysis of the forms and functions of
Holocaust memorialisation in human rights museums by asking about
the impact of global memory politics on how we imagine the present
and the future. It compares three human rights museums and their
respective emplotment of the Holocaust and seeks to illuminate how,
in this specific setting, memory politics simultaneously function
as future politics because they delineate a normative ideal of the
citizen-subject, its set of values and aspirations for the future:
that of the historically aware human rights advocate. More than an
ethical practice, engaging with the Holocaust is used as a means of
asserting one’s standing on "the right side of history"; the
memorialisation of the Holocaust has thus become a means of
governmentality, a way of governing contemporary citizen-subjects.
The linking of public memory of the Holocaust with the human rights
project is often presented as highly beneficial for all members of
what is often called the "global community". Yet this book argues
that this specific constellation of memory also has the ability to
function as an exercise of power, and thus runs the risk of
reinforcing structural oppression. With its novel theoretical
approach this book not only contributes to Memory Studies but also
connects Holocaust memory to Studies of Global Governmentality and
the debate on decolonising memory politics.
In Women's Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the
Japanese Empire, the author examines how writers captured various
experiences of living under imperialism in their fiction and
nonfiction works. Through an examination of texts by writers
producing in different parts of the empire (including the Japanese
metropole and the colonies and territories of Taiwan, Korea, and
Manchukuo), the book explores how women negotiated the social and
personal changes brought about by modernization of the social
institutions of education, marriage, family, and labor. Looking at
works by writers including young students in Manchukuo, Japanese
writer Hani Motoko, Korean writer Chang Tok-cho, and Taiwanese
writer Yang Ch'ien-Ho, the book sheds light upon how the act and
product of writing became a site for women to articulate their
hopes and desires while also processing sociopolitical
expectations. The author argues that women used their practice of
writing to construct their sense of self. The book ultimately shows
us how the words we write make us who we are.
Glass slippers, a fairy godmother, a ball, a prince, an evil
stepfamily, and a poor girl known for sitting amongst the ashes:
incarnations of the "Cinderella" fairy tale have resonated
throughout the ages. Hidden between the lines of this fairy tale
exists a history of fantasy about agency, power, and empowerment.
This book examines twenty-first-century "Cinderella" adaptations
that envision the classic tale in the twenty-first century through
the lens of wokenesss by shifting rhetorical implications and
self-reflexively granting different possibilities for protagonists.
The contributors argue that the "Cinderella" archetype expands past
traditional takes on the passive princess. From Sex and the City to
Game of Thrones, from cyborg "Cinderellas" to Inglorious Basterds,
contributors explore gender-bending and feminist adaptations,
explorations of race and the body, and post-human and post-truth
rewritings. The collection posits that contemporary "Cinderella"
adaptations create a substantive cultural product that both inform
and reflect a contemporary social zeitgeist.
A clear organized structure that allows for one chapter's lessons
to build on another, assisting in supporting and scaffolding
students' knowledge Clear visuals and charts that take into account
the learner's language level. Support for the instructor with
transcripts of materials and ideas for activities both in the
textbook and the workbook. Diverse video, audio, reading, and web
activities that engage the students at their level, thereby
supporting their participate in communicative activities. The
program has been the best seller as a college Russian textbook
through five editions since 1993
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