Rene Girard's mimetic theory opens up ways to make sense of the tension between the progressive politics of George Eliot and the conservative moralism of her narratives. In this innovative study, Bernadette Waterman Ward offers an original rereading of George Eliot's work through the lens of Rene Girard's theories of mimetic desire, violence, and the sacred. It is a fruitful mapping of a twentieth-century theorist onto a nineteenth-century novelist, revealing Eliot's understanding of imitative desire, rivalry, idol-making, and sacrificial victimization as critical elements of the social mechanism. While the unresolved tensions between Eliot's realism and her desire to believe in gradual social amelioration have often been studied, Ward is especially adept at articulating the details of such conflict in Eliot's early novels. In particular, Ward emphasizes the clash between the ruthless mechanisms of mimetic desire and the idea of progress, or, as Eliot stated, "growing good"; Eliot's Christian sympathy for sacrificial victims against her general rejection of Christianity; and her resort to "Nemesis" to evade the systemic injustice of the social sphere. The "angels" in the title are characters who appear to offer a humanist way forward in the absence of religious belief. They are represented, in Girardian terms, as figures who try to rise above the snares of the mimetic machine to imitate Christ's self-sacrifice but are finally rendered ineffectual. Very few studies have tackled Eliot's short fiction and narrative poetry. Eliot's Angels gives the short fiction its due, and it will appeal to scholars of mimetic and literary theory, Victorianists, and students of the novel.

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.

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.

Foreign Language Learning in the Digital Age addresses the growing significance of diversifying media in contemporary society and expands on current discourses that have formulated media and a multitude of literacies as integral objectives in 21st-century education. The book engages with epistemological and critical foundations of multiliteracies and related pedagogies for foreign language-learning contexts. It includes a discussion of how multimodal and digital media impact meaning-making practices in learning, the inherent potentials and challenges that are foregrounded in the use of multimodal and digital media and the contribution that (foreign) language education can provide in developing multiliteracies. The volume additionally addresses foreign language education across the formal educational spectrum: from primary education to adult and teacher education. This multifaceted volume presents the scope of media and literacies for foreign language education in the digital age and examples of best practice for working with media in formal language learning contexts. This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of language teaching and learning, digital education, media education, applied linguistics and TESOL.

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.

Arabic Disclosures presents readers with a comparative analysis of Arabic postcolonial autobiographical writing. In Arabic Disclosures Muhsin J. al-Musawi investigates the genre of autobiography within the modern tradition of Arabic literary writing from the early 1920s to the present. Al-Musawi notes in the introduction that the purpose of this work is not to survey the entirety of autobiographical writing in modern Arabic but rather to apply a rigorously identified set of characteristics and approaches culled from a variety of theoretical studies of the genre to a particular set of autobiographical works in Arabic, selected for their different methodologies, varying historical contexts within which they were conceived and written, and the equally varied lives experienced by the authors involved. The book begins in the larger context of autobiographical space, where the theories of Bourdieu, Bachelard, Bakhtin, and Lefebvre are laid out, and then considers the multiple ways in which a postcolonial awareness of space has impacted the writings of many of the authors whose works are examined. Organized chronologically, al-Musawi begins with the earliest modern example of autobiographical work in Taha Husayn's book, translated into English as The Stream of Days. Al-Musawi studies some of the major pioneers in the development of modern Arabic thought and literary expression: Jurji Zaydan, Mikha il Nu aymah, Ahmad Amin, Salamah Musa, Sayyid Qutb, and untranslated works by the prominent critic and scholar Hammadi Sammud, the novelist 'AliahMamduh, and others. He also examines the autobiographies of a number of women, including Nawal al-Sa'dawi and Fadwa Tuqan, and fiction writers. The book draws a map of Arab thought and culture in its multiple engagements with other cultures and will be useful for scholars and students of comparative literature, Arabic studies, and Middle Eastern studies, intellectual thought, and history.

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.

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.

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.

Gordon Merrick and the Great Gay American Novel is the first biography of Gordon Merrick, the most commercially successful writer of gay novels in the twentieth century. This book shows how Merrick's novels were largely based on his own life and time as a Princeton theater star, a Broadway actor, a New York reporter, an OSS spy, and the friend of countless artists and celebrities as an expatriate in France, Greece, and Sri Lanka. He lived much of his life as an openly gay man with his longtime partner, Charles Hulse. His 1970 novel, The Lord Won't Mind, broke new ground by showing that an affirming, explicitly gay novel could be a bestseller. His subsequent gay novels were both a cultural phenomenon and a lightning rod for literary critics. This book also examines the complex, often conflicting responses to Merrick's novels by gay readers and critics, and it thus recovers the early post-Stonewall debates over the definition of "gay literature." By reconstructing Merrick's life and critical fortunes, this book expands our understanding of what it means to be a gay man in the twentieth century.

This book examines how names in Africa have been fashioned to create dominance and subjugation, inclusion and exclusion, others and self. Drawing on global and African examples, but with particular reference to Zimbabwe, the author demonstrates how names are used in class, race, ethnic, national, gender, sexuality, religious and business struggles in society as weapons by ingroups and outgroups. Using Othering theory as a framework, the chapters explore themes such as globalised names and their demonstration of the other; onomastic erasure in colonial naming and the subsequent decoloniality in African name changes; othering of women in onomastics and crude and sophisticated phaulisms in the areas of race, ethnicity, nationality, disability and sexuality. Highlighting social power dynamics through onomastics, this book will be of interest to researchers of onomastics, social anthropology, sociolinguistics and African culture and history.

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.

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 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

* Provides reader-friendly Biographic Biliteracy Profiles to illustrate the diverse ways that bilingual reading behaviors are enacted within a translanguaging context. * Introduces how Biographic Biliteracy Profiles can act as a type of transformative assessment that can shed light on how bilingual readers make sense of texts in the context of their home and school environments. * Offers in-depth analysis, narratives, and insights through the lens of 5 bilingual readers from Spanish, Greek, Japanese and English backgrounds * Examines the role of bilingual readers' identities in the process of becoming biliterate and translanguaging

Bengalis in Burma looks at Bengali migrations and settlements in Burma from 1886 until the end of the British rule in Burma in 1948. As a result of British colonial policies, thousands of Bengalis from various classes and places in Bengal migrated to Burma and established Bengali communities in different parts of the country. The book provides a study of a vast body of Bangla writings on Burma written during this period by the Bengalis, a majority of whom went to Burma in various capacities and with various objectives. It takes note of a complex network of power, subjugation, and resistance which is integrally related to these acts of representation in Bangla textual discourses. Drawing on stories, political discussions in Bangla journals, unknown autobiographies, travelogues, and uncelebrated poems, it explores the ways contemporary Bengalis looked at Burma for various reasons and wondered about their locations within colonial systems. An important contribution to the study of South Asia, the book brings forth issues of representation, colonial knowledge system, and modernity. It will be of interest to students and researchers of history, literature, migration studies, colonialism, and South Asian studies.

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.