This book looks at how Europe's refugee crisis has provoked different political and humanitarian responses, all similarly driven by technology. The author first explores the transformation of Europe into an increasingly militarised space, where technologies are mainly used to exercise surveillance and to distinguish between citizens and unwanted migrants. She then shifts the attention to refugees' practices of connectivity by looking at how technologies are used by refugees to communicate, perform and resist their exile. Finally, the book examines the opportunities and challenges that characterise the impact of digital social innovation in humanitarian settings. By focusing on how technologies are used to promote solidarity in crisis contexts, the volume provides an original contribution to studying the role of tech for good activism within the space of Fortress Europe. Based on interviews with refugees, digital humanitarians and social entrepreneurs, the book timely questions what Europe means today, and why dialogue is now more important than ever.

This volume responds to the current interest in computational and statistical methods to describe and analyse metre, style, and poeticity, particularly insofar as they can open up new research perspectives in literature, linguistics, and literary history. The contributions are representative of the diversity of approaches, methods, and goals of a thriving research community. Although most papers focus on written poetry, including computer-generated poetry, the volume also features analyses of spoken poetry, narrative prose, and drama. The contributions employ a variety of methods and techniques ranging from motif analysis, network analysis, machine learning, and Natural Language Processing. The volume pays particular attention to annotation, one of the most basic practices in computational stylistics. This contribution to the growing, dynamic field of digital literary studies will be useful to both students and scholars looking for an overview of current trends, relevant methods, and possible results, at a crucial moment in the development of novel approaches, when one needs to keep in mind the qualitative, hermeneutical benefit made possible by such quantitative efforts.

This book explores Thomas Paine's French decade, from the publication of the first part of Rights of Man in the spring of 1791 to his return trip to the United States in the fall of 1802. It examines Paine's multifarious activities during this period as a thinker, writer, member of the French Convention, lobbyist, adviser to French governments, officious diplomat and propagandist. Using previously neglected sources and archival material, Carine Lounissi demonstrates both how his republicanism was challenged, bolstered and altered by this French experience, and how his positions at key moments of the history of the French experiment forced major participants in the Revolution to defend or question the kind of regime or of republic they wished to set up. As a member of the Lafayette circle when writing the manuscript of Rights of Man, of the Girondin constellation in the Convention, one of the few democrats who defended universal suffrage after Thermidor, and as a member of the Constitutional Circle which promoted a kind of republic which did not match his ideas, Paine baffled his contemporaries and still puzzles the present-day scholar. This book intends to offer a new perspective on Paine, and on how this major agent of revolutions contributed to the debate on the French Revolution both in France and outside France.

Even though the literary trope of the flaneur has been proclaimed 'dead' on several occasions, it still proves particularly lively in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This study investigates how flanerie takes a belated 'ethical turn' in its more recent manifestations by negotiating models of ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucault's writings on the 'aesthetics of existence' as well as Judith Butler's notion of precariousness as conditio humana, it establishes a link between post-sovereign models of subject formation and a paradoxical constellation of flanerie, which surfaces most prominently in the work of Walter Benjamin. By means of detailed readings of Ian McEwan's Saturday, Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold, Teju Cole's Open City, Dionne Brand's What We All Long For and Robin Robertson's The Long Take, Or a Way to Lose More Slowly, this book traces how the ambivalence of flanerie and its textual representation produces ethical norms while at the same time propagating the value of difference by means of disrupting societal norms of sameness. Precarious Flanerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction thus shows that the flanerie text becomes a medium of ethical critique in post-postmodern times.

The importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics In an age where our experiences are processed and filtered through a wide variety of mediums, both digital and physical, how do we tell our own story? How do we "get a life," make sense of who we are and the way we live, and communicate that to others? Stories of the Self takes the literary study of autobiography and opens it up to a broad and fascinating range of material practices beyond the book, investigating the manifold ways people are documenting themselves in contemporary culture. Anna Poletti explores Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, a collection of six hundred cardboard boxes filled with text objects from the artist's everyday life; the mid-aughts crowdsourced digital archive PostSecret; queer zine culture and its practices of remixing and collaging; and the bureaucratic processes surrounding surveillance dossiers. Stories of the Self argues that while there is a strong emphasis on the importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics, mediation is just as important in establishing the credibility and legibility of life writing. Poletti argues that the very media used for writing our lives intrinsically shapes how we are seen to matter.

This book investigates the use of digital technologies for social organisation during the Covid-19 pandemic, interrogating the specific relationship between digital technologies and social movements. Drawing upon Marx's theory of alienation and Antonio Gramsci's concepts concerning common-sense, good sense, hegemony and praxis, the author examines the effectiveness of digital technologies in filling the social void created by the pandemic. A series of in-depth interviews across a spectrum of areas - from community activism, mental health, trade union organisation, the creative arts, and resistance movements - reveal how digital technologies flourished during the pandemic crisis, facilitating new ways to communicate. However, the interviews also throw into sharp relief the inadequacies of digital technologies. The book challenges conventional wisdom concerning the beneficial impact of digital machines on our lives. This book will have a broad appeal to anyone researching or teaching the societal, ethical and political implications of digital technologies, particularly from a qualitative perspective. It also has relevance for a wider readership concerned about the influence of social media.

In Dostoevsky as Suicidologist, Amy D. Ronner illustrates how self-homicide in Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction prefigures Emile Durkheim's etiology in Suicide as well as theories of other prominent suicidologists. This book not only fills a lacuna in Dostoevsky scholarship, but provides fresh readings of Dostoevsky's major works, including Notes from The House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Ronner provides an exegesis of how Dostoevsky's implicit awareness of fatalistic, altruistic, egoistic, and anomic modes of self-destruction helped shape not only his philosophy, but also his craft as a writer. In this study, Ronner contributes to the field of suicidology by anatomizing both self-destructive behavior and suicidal ideation while offering ways to think about prevention. But most expansively, Ronner tackles the formidable task of forging a ligature between artistic creation and the pluripresent social fact of self-annihilation.

American Lit Remixed identifies a new sound in literature emerging after the digital revolution. It reads works by Jennifer Egan, Sherman Alexie, and others through the lenses of remix theory -- the term Eduardo Navas coined to describe the remix as a form of artistic and cultural discourse -- and the music industry's preoccupations with nostalgia and authenticity, arguing that digital-age fiction, poetry, and drama remix the music and technology of the past to offer new modes of connecting to self, others, and place. Musical features such as references to popular songs, structural similarities to music recordings, and thematic treatment of the riffing and borrowing endemic within popular music lend a retro sound, feel, and structure to contemporary American texts, even when they refer to life in the digital era. Through engaging with the musical past, literature resists nostalgia and remixes the twenty-first century's dystopian, disconnected ethos to find possibility and hope for the future. Critics often focus on technology's negative impact on the music industry, but American Lit Remixed emphasizes music as a source of creative potential in twenty-first-century literature, including new ways of storytelling and relating.

This book examines diverse literary writings in Bangla related to crime in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial Bengal, with a timely focus on gender. It analyses crime-centred fiction and non-fiction in the region to see how actual or imagined crimes related to women were shaped and fashioned into images and narratives for contemporary genteel readers. The writings have been examined within a social-historical context where gender was a fiercely contested terrain for publicly fought debates on law, sexual relations, reform, and identity as moulded by culture, class, and caste. Both canonized literary writings (like those of Bankim Chatterji) as well as non-canonical, popular writings (of writers who have not received sufficient critical attention) are scrutinised in order to examine how criminal offences featuring women (as both victims and offenders) have been narrated in early manifestations of the genre of crime writing in Bangla. An empowered and thought-provoking study, this book will be of special interest to scholars of criminology and social justice, literature, and gender.

This study examines contemporary Spanish dystopian literature and films (in)directly related to the 2008 financial crisis from an urban cultural studies perspective. It explores culturally-charged landscapes that effectively convey the zeitgeist and reveal deep-rooted anxieties about issues such as globalization, consumerism, immigration, speculation, precarity, and political resistance (particularly by Indignados [Indignant Ones] from the 15-M Movement). The book loosely traces the trajectory of the crisis, with the first part looking at texts that underscore some of the behaviors that indirectly contributed to the crisis, and the remaining chapters focusing on works that directly examine the crisis and its aftermath. This close reading of texts and films by Ray Loriga, Elia Barcelo, Ion de Sosa, Jose Ardillo, David Llorente, Eduardo Vaquerizo, and Ricardo Menendez Salmon offers insights into the creative ways that these authors and directors use spatial constructions to capture the dystopian imagination.

Comparative Postcolonialism in the Works of V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison: Fragmented Identities begins with an overview of its theoretical framework, highlighting the intersectional relationship between postcolonial literature and comparative literature. Tracing selected novels by Naipaul and Morrison, the book takes, as a starting point, Fanon's three-phase journey of the decolonizing process. In the first phase of mimicry, Naipaul's and Morrison's earlier novels represent the assimilation of indigenous people into dominant hegemonic cultures. The second phase is envisioned as the re-narration or re-interpretation of the past and old legends of indigenous culture. Morrison succeeds in asserting that her ancestors' past is the only way to celebrate a cultural identity, but Naipaul tends to criticize and neglect his past and his original, indigenous culture. The third phase marks the emergence of a revolutionary literature, in which Naipaul and Morrison guide their people to hybridity as a new way of becoming and resisting the hegemonic dichotomies in dominant societies.

Mass-Market Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, 1972-2017 tracks the transformation of liberal thought in the contemporary United States through the unique lens of the popular paperback. The book focuses on cultural shifts as they appear in works written by some of the most widely-read authors of the last fifty years: the idea of love within a New Economy (Danielle Steel), the role of government in scientific inquiry (Michael Crichton), entangled political alliances and legacies in the aftermath of the 1960s (Tom Clancy), the restructured corporation (John Grisham), and the blurred line between state and personal empowerment (Dean Koontz). To address the current crisis, this book examines how the changed character of American liberalism has been rendered legible for a mass audience.

This book examines the speculative core of Karl Barth's theology, reconsidering the relationship between theory and practice in Barth's thinking. A consequence of this reconsideration is the recognition that Barth's own account of his theological development is largely correct. Sigurd Baark draws heavily on the philosophical tradition of German Idealism, arguing that an important part of what makes Barth a speculative theologian is the way his thinking is informed by the nexus of self-consciousness, reason and, freedom, which was most fully developed by Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. The book provides a new interpretation of Barth's theology, and shows how a speculative understanding of theology is useful in today's intellectual climate.

A History of Central European Women's Writing offers a unique survey of literature from the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. It illustrates the development of women's writing in the region from the middle ages to the present day, placing individual writers in their social and political context and showing how processes shaping their lives are reflected in their works.

The Monstrous Feminine is one of the most influential books to emerge in the early 90s In this new edition, Creed does it again, recontextualizing the conception of the monstrous-feminine to track many of the evolutions in the horror genre This updated edition includes an entirely new section examining contemporary feminist horror films in relation to nonhuman theory Barbara Creed’s classic remains as relevant as ever

The first collection of environmental writing about the Gulf South region, this volume features a diverse array of voices from the past 100 years. The work of these writers and artists enriches how we understand and represent the relationship between people and the rapidly changing ecology of the Gulf.Reaching from Texas to Florida, this anthology presents pieces from a variety of genres, from journalism to poetry to memoir to a graphic nonfiction book. It comprises renowned authors such as Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward, and E. O. Wilson alongside strong but lesser-known writers and emerging writers. The subjects include natural and human-made disasters, the impact of industry, influential historical events, personal encounters with the environment, and a deep love for the land and water by the people who live there. Reflecting a range of different landscapes and their inhabitants, and emphasizing the human voice and condition throughout, The Gulf South brings to light a region whose influence on American commerce and culture reaches far beyond its geographical boundaries. This volume encourages readers to consider how we choose to characterize the environment and its degradation through language, and how these accounts affect our thinking and planning for the future.

In recent years, the material circumstances governing the production of African literature have been analyzed from a variety of angles. This study goes one step further by charting the trajectories of a corpus of francophone African (sub-Saharan) narratives subsequently translated into English. It examines the role of various institutional agents and agencies-publishers, preface writers, critics, translators, and literary award committees-involved in the value-making process that accrues visibility to these texts that eventually reach the Anglo-American book market. The author evinces that over time different types of publishers dominated, both within the original publishing space as in the foreign literary field, contingent on their specific mission-be it commercial, ideological or educational-as well as on socioeconomic and political circumstances. The study addresses the influence of the editorial paratextual framing-pandering to specific Western readerships-the potential interventionist function of the translator, and the consecrating mechanisms of literary and translation awards affecting both gender and minority representation. Drawing on the work by key sociologists and translation theorists, the author uses an innovative interdisciplinary methodology to analyze the corpus narratives.

Interactive Media for Sustainability presents a conceptually rich, critical account of the design and use of interactive technologies to engage the public with sustainability. Treating interactive technologies as forms of mediation, the book argues that these technologies advance multiple understandings of sustainability. At stake are the ways sustainability encodes the complexity of interrelated social and natural systems, and how it conveys the malleability of the future. The book's argument is anchored in a diverse set of theoretical resources that include contemporary work in human-computer interaction (HCI), social theory, media studies, and the philosophy of technology, and is animated by a variety of examples, including interactive simulations, persuasive apps, digital games, art installations, and decision-support tools.

This volume aims to intensify the interdisciplinary dialogue on comics and related popular multimodal forms (including manga, graphic novels, and cartoons) by focusing on the concept of medial, mediated, and mediating agency. To this end, a theoretically and methodologically diverse set of contributions explores the interrelations between individual, collective, and institutional actors within historical and contemporary comics cultures. Agency is at stake when recipients resist hegemonic readings of multimodal texts. In the same manner, "authorship" can be understood as the attribution of agency of and between various medial instances and roles such as writers, artists, colorists, letterers, or editors, as well as with regard to commercial rights holders such as publishing houses or conglomerates and reviewers or fans. From this perspective, aspects of comics production (authorship and institutionalization) can be related to aspects of comics reception (appropriation and discursivation), and circulation (participation and canonization), including their potential for transmedialization and making contributions to the formation of the public sphere.

New readings of 20th-century literary cinematic texts are presented here in historical context, informed by cultural theory. New readings of literary and cinematic texts are presented here in historical context, informed by cultural theory. In her survey of the history of Spanish cinema in the dictatorship and democratic periods, the author argues thatstudies of adaptations must simultaneously address questions of 'text' - formal issues central to the study of film and literature - and 'context' - ideological concerns crucial to late twentieth-century Spain. She examines threethemes of particular importance to contemporary Spanish culture - the recuperation of history, the negotiation of the rural and the urban, and the representation of gender - and considers the related stylistic issues of the affinities between cinematic expression and nostalgia, the city and phallocentrism. The study concludes with an analysis of the formal question of the narrator in film and literature, through an assessment of Bunuel's previously unacknowledged stylistic debt to Galdos as manifested in his adaptations of Nazarin and Tristana. SALLY FAULKNER is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter.

The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library's special collections. The editors invite the submission of articles in these fields and welcome discussion of in-progress projects. -- .

This book is the first full-length study of the development of Irish political print culture from the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 to the advent of the Hanoverian succession in 1714. Based on extensive analysis of publications produced in Ireland during the period, including newspapers, sermons and pamphlet literature, this book demonstrates that print played a significant role in contributing to escalating tensions between tory and whig partisans in Ireland during this period. Indeed, by the end of Queen Anne's reign the public were, for the first time in an Irish context, called upon in printed publications to make judgements about the behaviour of politicians and political parties and express their opinion in this regard at the polls. These new developments laid the groundwork for further expansion of the Irish press over the decades that followed.