Using contemporary autobiography theory, and literary and anthropological approaches, Wong traces the development of Native American autobiography from pre-literate oral, artistic, and dramatic personal narratives through late nineteenth/early twentieth-century life histories to contemporary autobiographies. Her purpose is to expand the definitions of autobiography to include non-written forms of personal narrative and non-Western concepts of self, and to highlight the incorporation of traditional tribal modes of personal narrative into Westerm forms of contemporary autobiography.

The first chapter presents Wong's theoretical framework, considering Native American traditions of personal narrative in the context of the most recent work on autobiography theory. After this theoretical section, the book is arranged by the three basic historical periods of Native American literaturres: 1) the pre-Columbian period which includes oral and pictographic forms of personal narrative; 2) the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century transitional period which includes as-told-to life histories that were solicited, translated, and edited by white editors and a few autobiographies written by Indians; 3) the contemporary period which includes written autobiographies that combine Native American and Euro-American forms and themes. These categories emphasize the historical shift from orality to literacy as well as the transition from pre-contact tribal life to post-contact reservation life.

In Ecotheology and Love: The Converging Poetics of Sohrab Sepehri and James Baldwin, Bahar Davary points to the interrelation of religion, poetry, and ecology from a comparative perspective with an emphasis on decoloniality. This work shows how authors Sohrab Seperhi and James Baldwin sought social justice by building their work on love and an authentic way of knowing the world based on an interconnected knowledge of the self. The layers of depth in Sepehri and Baldwin's works and their immediacy for our time has yet to be fully understood, but through Ecotheology and Love, Davary takes a significant step towards achieving such a fuller understanding.

Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises asks whether literary works that interrogate and alter the terms of human-nonhuman relations can point to new, more sustainable ways forward. Bringing insights from the field of literary animal studies, a diverse and international group of scholars examine literary contributions to the ecological framing of human-nonhuman relationships. Collectively, the contributors to this edited collection contemplate the role of literature in the setting of environmental agendas and in determining humanity's path forward in the company of nonhuman others.

Essays by a founder of the Borderland Foundation in East-Central Europe explore the meanings of community in a fractured world. How do we build civil society? How does a society repair itself after violence? How do we live in a world with others different from ourselves? These questions lie at the heart of Krzysztof Czyzewski's writing and his work with Fundacja Pogranicze, the Borderland Foundation, at the border of Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus. Writing from the heartland of Europe's violence and creativity, Czyzewski seeks to explain how we can relate better to each other and to our diverse communities. Building on examples of places and people in East-Central Europe, Czyzewski's essays offer readers concepts such as the invisible bridge, the nejmar (the bridge-builder), and the xenopolis (the city of others), which create community throughout the world. The three sections of the book-concepts, places, and practices-show how this cultural work bridges the divide between concepts and practices and offers a new map of Europe. Ultimately, Czyzewski hopes we can all move toward xenopolis, toward the understanding that others are, in fact, ourselves. This book offers an introduction to Czyzewski's work, with framing essays by specialists in Central and East European history.

This book provides an accessible and up to date overview of the foundational issues about both emerging constructive understandings of the digital era and still hidden and ignored aspects that could instead be dramatically relevant in the future, in the process of a technological humanism. The book offers relevant scientific and ethical questions bringing together professionals and researchers, from different professional and disciplinary fields, who have a shared interest in investigating operative aspects of technological, digital and cultural transitions of humans and their capacity of building human societies. The challenges are clear but there is a lack of an epistemological, anthropological, economic and social agenda that would enable a drive to such transitions towards a technological humanism. This book provides an ideal platform for professionals and scholars, not only providing tools for problem analysis, but also indicating shared directions, needs and objectives for a common goal; the creation of new scenarios instead of the creation of fears and manipulated social imaginaria.

This book situates Ralph Waldo Emerson in the tradition of philosophy as "spiritual exercise", arguing that the defining feature of his literary philosophy is the conviction that there is an inherent link between moral persuasion and literary excellence. Hosseini persuasively argues that the Emersonian project can be viewed as an extension of Socrates' call for a return to the beginning of philosophy, to search for a way of revolutionizing our ways of seeing from within. Examining Emerson's provocative style of writing, Hosseini contends that his prose is shaped by a desire to bring about psychagogia, or influencing the soul through the power of words. This book furthermore examines the evolving nature of Emerson's thoughts on "scholarly action" and its implications, his religious temperament as an aesthetic experience of the world through wonder, and the reasons for a resounding acknowledgment of despair in his essay "Experience." In the concluding chapter, Hosseini explores the depth of Emerson's engagement with the classical Persian poets and argues that what we may call his "literary humanism" is informed by Persian Adab, exemplified in the writings of Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi. Weaving together themes from Persian philosophy and Emersonian transcendentalism, Hosseini establishes Emerson's way of seeing as refreshingly relevant, showing that the questions he tackled in his writings are as pressing today as they were in his time.

Following Francoise d'Eaubonne's creation of the term "ecofeminism" in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that emphasize international perspectives, furthering the comparative task launched by Mies and Shiva. To date, however, there have been no books devoted to gaining a broad-based understanding of feminist ecocriticism in India, understood in its own terms. Our new volume Indian Feminist Ecocriticism offers a survey of literature as seen through an ecofeminist lens by Indian scholars, which places contemporary literary analysis through a sampling of its diverse languages and in the context of millennia-old mythic traditions of India.

This book explores the business practices of the British publishing industry from 1843-1900, discussing the role of creative businesses in society and the close relationship between culture and business in a historical context. Marrisa Joseph develops a strong cultural, social and historical discussion around the developments in copyright law, gender and literary culture from a management perspective; analysing how individuals formed professional associations and contract law to instigate new processes. Drawing on institutional theory and analysing primary and archival sources, this book traces how the practices of literary businesses developed, reproduced and later legitimised. By offering a close analysis of some of publishing's most influential businesses, it provides an insight into the decision-making processes that shaped an industry and brings to the fore the 'institutional story' surrounding literary business and their practices, many of which can still be seen today.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Obscure Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return offers a new perspective of migration studies that views the concept of migration in Arabic as inherently embracing the notion of return. Starting the study with the significance of the Islamic hijra as the quintessential migrant narrative in Arabic culture, Elmeligi offers readings of Arabic narratives as early as Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan and as recent as Miral Al-Tahawy's 2010 Brooklyn Heights, and as varied as Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz's short story adaptation of the ancient Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe and Yemeni novelist Mohammed Abdl Wali's They Die Strangers, including novels that have not been translated in English before, such as Sonallah Ibrahim's Amrikanli and Suhayl Idris' The Latin Quarter. To contextualize these narratives, Elmeligi employs studies of cultural identity and their features that are most impacted by migration. In this study, Elmeligi analyzes the different manifestations of return, whether physical or psychological, commenting not only on the decisions that the characters take in the novels, but also the narrative choices that the writers make, thus viewing narrativity as a form of performativity of cultural identity as well. The book addresses fresh angles of migration studies, identity theory, and Arabic literary analysis that are of interest to scholars and students.

Language, Health and Culture brings together contributions by linguistic scholars working in the area of health communication in Asia—in particular, in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan. Olga Zayts-Spence and Susan M. Bridges, along with the contributors, draw on a diverse range of authentic data from different (primary, secondary, digital) healthcare contexts across Asia. The contributions probe empirical analyses and meta-reflections on the empirical, epistemological and theoretical foundations of doing research on language and health communication in Asia. While many of the medical and technological advances originate from the ‘non-English-dominant’/‘peripheral’ contexts, when it comes to health communication, there is a strong tendency to downplay and marginalize the scope and the impact of the ripe research tradition in these contexts. The contributions to the edited volume problematize the hegemony of dominant (Anglocentric) traditions in health communication research by highlighting culture- and context-specific ways of interpreting different health realities through linguistic lenses.

This pioneering book is the first English-language collection of academic articles on Jin Yong's works. It introduces an important dissenting voice in Chinese literature to the English-speaking audience. Jin Yong is hailed as the most influential martial arts novelist in twentieth-century Chinese literary history. His novels are regarded by readers and critics as "the common language of Chinese around the world" because of their international circulation and various adaptations (film, television serials, comic books, video games). Not only has the public affirmed the popularity and literary value of his novels, but the academic world has finally begun to notice his achievement as well. The significance of this book lies in its interpretation of Jin Yong's novels through the larger lens of twentieth-century Chinese literature. It considers the important theoretical issues arising from such terms as modernity, gender, nationalism, East/West conflict, and high literature versus low culture. The contributors of the articles are all eminent scholars, including famous exiled scholar, philosopher, and writer Liu Zaifu.

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France's preeminent College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since 2002, but here, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English. Divided into five themed volumes, readers are presented in volume five, 'Simply a Particular Contemporary': Interviews, with four interviews Barthes conducted between 1970 and 1979, varying widely in style and content.

Radical Hope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon: The Moon and Meteor provides a careful consideration of the author's career, examining the ways in which the subversion of his early novels feeds into the radical optimism of his later works. The book's first half explores the author's use of the image of the Moon as a romanticized ideal that is irreparably corrupted by and corruptly manipulated by forces of worldly power. The second half takes up the meteor as an image of impending violence that has yet to be full realized, finding in the unlikely possibility of that violence being somehow averted, a reckless sort of hope. This foolhardy but nonetheless real hope to escape from violent, oppressive structures and forge a real ethical obligation to the other marks the development of these paired metaphors, and through them Pynchon introduces the possibility, however slight, that literature, with its powerfully intimate relationship with consciousness, may at least sustain that hope.

When Scenes of Clerical Life appeared anonymously in 1853 the Saturday Review pictured its author, George Eliot, as a bearded Cambridge clergyman and the revered father of several children. When Anthony Trollope published Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel anonymously in 1867, the London Review argued that the internal evidence required the author to be female.

Gender played a pivotal role in the reception of Victorian novels and was not only an analytical category used by Victorian reviewers to conceptualize, interpret, and evaluate novels, but in some cases was the primary category. This book analyzes over 100 nineteenth-century reviews of several prominent novels, both canonical and non-canonical, chosen for the various ways in which they conformed with and deviated from conventional gender stereotypes. Among these titles are Charles Reade's It Is Never Too Late to Mend, Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights, Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers and Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe.

This study goes beyond the intuitive notion that a double standard existed in the Victorian era which undervalues the work of women writers. Male writers, such as Trollope, were in fact also vulnerable to the masculine/feminine hierarchies of Victorian literary criticism. Some women writers, on the other hand, actually benefitted from gendered evaluations. Charlotte Yonge, for instance, conformed so closely to the ideal and idealized view of feminine writing that she is chivalrously exempted from more critical examinations of intellectual content. Having unearthed often ignored or neglected sources, Thompson examines the ways in which Victorian constructions of literary reputations were filtered through preconceptions about gender and writing.

Writers and Nations:The Case of American and Saudi Literatures examines how the concept of the nation in nineteenth century American literature and twentieth century and contemporary Saudi Arabian literature is represented in an array of relevant works. Reading their works gives us a sense of their conceptions of nation as a political and/or a social community. Writers examined in this book often see the nation as a threat to marginalized groups, due to its cultural, religious and political constraints. Writers tend to represent the tension between individuals and communities as a significant key to understanding a particular nation. This tension carries in it a sense of the boundaries of the nation. It is a question of who is part of the nation and who is not. The constraints of a certain nation, be they political or social, include the dominant by excluding the repressed or the marginalized. In other words, by exposing the tension between disenfranchised and dominant groups, writers define, redefine and reform for us the national political and social scenes of a particular nation.

This book questions when, why, and how it is just for a people to go to war, or to refrain from warring, in a post-9/11 world. To do so, it explores Just War Theory (JWT) in relationship to recent American accounts of the experience of war. The book analyses the jus ad bellum criteria of just war-right intention, legitimate authority, just cause, probability of success, and last resort-before exploring jus in bello, or the law that governs the way in which warfare is conducted. By combining just-war ethics and sustained explorations of major works of twentieth and twenty-first century American war writing, this study offers the first book-length reflection on how JWT and literary studies can inform one another fruitfully.

Wu’s book provides an innovative perspective on, and recommendations for, the major aspects of second language (L2) teaching from a Hegelian anthro-philosophical perspective. Language is social in nature and is related to the larger social milieu. Hegelian philosophy of language complements existing research and theories on L2 learning by not only equipping them with a systematic framework but also broadening their scope. In Hegelian philosophy, language not only has its individual and interpersonal dimensions but is also related to the community, society, and morality. The Hegelian perspective also suggests a number of functions of L2 which have either been neglected or rejected by L2 researchers. This book highlights these neglected elements such as intersubjectivity, mutual recognition, universalization and objectivization of inner subjectivity of individuals, as well as moral enhancement. These concepts generate insights on the teaching and learning of L2. Wu’s volume also covers how the Hegelian anthro-philosophical perspective can help to re-interpret research results on L2 learner characteristics that are related to L2 learning to date such as L2 identity and autonomy. The book offers an alternative research paradigm, teaching philosophy, pedagogical implications, and suggestions for scholars, practitioners, and students in the professional field of L2 teaching.

Cabo Verdean Women Writing Remembrance, Resistance, and Revolution: Kriolas Poderozas documents the work and stories told by Cabo Verdean women to refocus the narratives about Cabo Verde on Cabo Verdean women and their experiences. The contributors examine their own experiences, the history of Cabo Verde, and Cabo Verdean diaspora to highlight the commonalities that exist among all women of African descent, such as sexual and domestic violence and media objectification, as well as the different meanings these commonalities can hold in local contexts. Through exploring the literary and musical contributions of Cabo Verdean women, the Cabo Verdean state and its transnational relations, food and cooking traditions, migration and diaspora, and the oral histories of Cabo Verde, the contributors analyze themes of community, race, sexuality, migration, gender, and tradition.

This volume presents a series of essays in honor of noted scholar of political theory, Mary P. Nichols. The essays reflect Nichols' pathbreaking work in ancient Greek political thought, as well as her influential treatments of works of literature and film in conversation with political theory. Part I: Conversations Concerning Love and Friendship features essays about the philosophical meaning of human connection and affection. Part II: Conversations Between Politics and Poetry looks at the political significance of art, and the ways in which political rule can be understood to be "artistic" or poetic. Part III: Conversations from Tragedy to Comedy considers whether the human need for community is something to be lamented or celebrated. Broad in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, the essays in this volume address authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Mary Wollstonecraft, G.W.F. Hegel, Jane Austen, Henry James, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, as well as the films of Woody Allen and Whit Stillman.

This timely intervention into composition studies presents a case for the need to teach all students a shared system of communication and logic based on the modern globalizing ideals of universality, neutrality, and empiricism. Based on a series of close readings of contemporary writing by Stanley Fish, Asao Inoue, Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Zizek, and Steven Pinker, this book critiques recent arguments that traditional approaches to teaching writing, grammar, and argumentation foster marginalization, oppression, and the restriction of student agency. Instead, it argues that the best way to educate and empower a diverse global student body is to promote a mode of academic discourse dedicated to the impartial judgment of empirical facts communicated in an open and clear manner. It provides a critical analysis of core topics in composition studies, including the teaching of grammar; notions of objectivity and neutrality; empiricism and pragmatism; identity politics; and postmodernism. Aimed at graduate students and junior instructors in rhetoric and composition, as well as more seasoned scholars and program administrators, this polemical book provides an accessible staging of key debates that all writing instructors must grapple with.

How did the buying and collecting of books figure in the lives and works of the Romantics, those supposed apostles of spiritualized poetic genius? Why was book collecting controversial during the Romantic period, and what role has book collecting played in the history of homophobia? The Queer Bookishness of Romanticism: Ornamental Community addresses these and more questions about the suppressed bookish dimension of Romanticism, as well as Romanticism's historical forebears and Victorian inheritors. The analysis ranges widely, addressing the bookish proclivities of the "romantic friends" the Ladies of Llangollen, the camp works about book collecting produced by a subculture calling themselves "ornamental gentlemen," narratives of prototypically punk collecting and flaneuring by the essayist and collector Charles Lamb, and rare-book forgeries by Thomas J. Wise and Harry Forman, queer bibliographer-scholars responsible for canonizing some of the Romantic poets during the Victorian period. In the process, this book uncovers surprising connections between conceptions of literature and sexuality; literary materiality and queerness; and forgery, sexuality, and authorship.

Beginning with Tolstoy's first extant records of his written oeuvre, this anthology assembles seventy-seven unabridged texts that cover more than seven decades of his life, from 1835 to 1910. It constitutes the most complete single-volume edition to date of the rich variety of Tolstoy's philosophical output: apothegmatic sayings, visions, intimate sketchbook and day notes, book reviews, open letters, dialogues, pedagogic talks, public lectures, programs and rules for personal behavior, fictions, and reminiscences. Most of these newly translated and thoroughly annotated texts have never been available in English. Among the four reprinted translations personally checked and authorized by Tolstoy is the text titled "Tolstoy on Venezuela," an archival restoration of an authentic first publication in English of "Patriotism, or Peace?" (1896) that had been deemed lost. In the inaugural piece, a seven-year-old Tolstoy describes violent but natural animal life in contrast with the lazy life of a peaceful barnyard in the countryside. The last entry in the anthology written by an eighty-year-old Tolstoy for his grandchildren provides a lesson on vegetarianism and non-violence that a hungry wolf teaches a hungry boy during their conversation when both are on their way to lunch. It was the insolvable, the "scandalous," problems of philosophy that never gave Tolstoy any rest: freedom of the will, religious tolerance, gender inequality, the tonal shape of music, the value of healthy life habits, the responsibilities of teaching, forms of social protest, cognitive development, science in society, the relation between body and mind, charity and labor, human dignity and public service, sexual psychology, national war doctrines, suicide, individual sacrifice, the purposes of making art. And always: What are the sources of violence? Why should we engage in politics? Why do we need governments? How can one practice non-violence? What is the meaning of our irrepressible desire to seek and find meaning? Why can't we live without loving? The typeset proofs of his final insights were brought to Tolstoy for approval when he was already on his deathbed. The reader will find all the texts in the exact shape and order of completion as Tolstoy left them. No matter their brevity or the occasion on which they were written, these works exemplify Tolstoy as an artistically inventive and intellectually absorbing thinker.

Beginning with Tolstoy's first extant records of his written oeuvre, this anthology assembles seventy-seven unabridged texts that cover more than seven decades of his life, from 1835 to 1910. It constitutes the most complete single-volume edition to date of the rich variety of Tolstoy's philosophical output: apothegmatic sayings, visions, intimate sketchbook and day notes, book reviews, open letters, dialogues, pedagogic talks, public lectures, programs and rules for personal behavior, fictions, and reminiscences. Most of these newly translated and thoroughly annotated texts have never been available in English. Among the four reprinted translations personally checked and authorized by Tolstoy is the text titled "Tolstoy on Venezuela," an archival restoration of an authentic first publication in English of "Patriotism, or Peace?" (1896) that had been deemed lost. In the inaugural piece, a seven-year-old Tolstoy describes violent but natural animal life in contrast with the lazy life of a peaceful barnyard in the countryside. The last entry in the anthology written by an eighty-year-old Tolstoy for his grandchildren provides a lesson on vegetarianism and non-violence that a hungry wolf teaches a hungry boy during their conversation when both are on their way to lunch. It was the insolvable, the "scandalous," problems of philosophy that never gave Tolstoy any rest: freedom of the will, religious tolerance, gender inequality, the tonal shape of music, the value of healthy life habits, the responsibilities of teaching, forms of social protest, cognitive development, science in society, the relation between body and mind, charity and labor, human dignity and public service, sexual psychology, national war doctrines, suicide, individual sacrifice, the purposes of making art. And always: What are the sources of violence? Why should we engage in politics? Why do we need governments? How can one practice non-violence? What is the meaning of our irrepressible desire to seek and find meaning? Why can't we live without loving? The typeset proofs of his final insights were brought to Tolstoy for approval when he was already on his deathbed. The reader will find all the texts in the exact shape and order of completion as Tolstoy left them. No matter their brevity or the occasion on which they were written, these works exemplify Tolstoy as an artistically inventive and intellectually absorbing thinker.