In 1944, the novel Xie [Crabs] by Mei Niang (1916-2013) was honored with the Japanese Empire's highest literary award, Novel of the Year. Then, at the peak of her popularity, Mei Niang published in Japanese-owned, Chinese-language journals and newspapers in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (1932-1945), Japan, and north China. Contemporaries lauded her writings, especially for introducing liberalism to Manchuria's literary world. In Maoist China, however, Mei Niang was condemned as a traitor and a Rightist with her life and career torn to shreds until her formal vindication in the late 1970s. In 1997, Mei Niang was named one of "100 modern Chinese writers." The collection that is translated in this volume, Xiaojie ji [Young lady's collection], was published in 1936, when she was 19 years old. Long thought forever lost in the violence of China's civil war and Maoist strife, the collection was only re-discovered in 2019. This is the first book-length, English-language translation of the work of this high-profile, prolific New Woman writer from Northeast China. Mei Niang's Long-Lost First Writings will appeal to those interested in Chinese literature, the Japanese Empire, historic fiction, history, women's/gender history, and students in undergraduate and graduate level courses. To date, English-language volumes of translated Chinese literature have rarely focused on Manchukuo's Chinese writers or centered on those who left the puppet state by1935. This volume fills an important historical lacuna - a teenaged Chinese woman's views of life and literature in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.

Routledge Handbook of Ancient, Classical, and Late Classical Persian Literature contains scholarly essays and sample texts related to Persian literature from 650BCE through the sixteenth century CE. It includes analyses of some seminal ancient texts and the works of numerous authors of the classical period. The chapters apply a disciplinary or an interdisciplinary approach to the many movements, genres, and works of the long and evolving body of Persian literature produced in the Persianate World. These collections of scholarly essays and samples of Persian literary texts provide facts (general information), instructions (ways to understand, analyze, and appreciate this body of works), and the field's state-of-the-art research (the problematics of the topics) regarding one of the most important and oldest literary traditions in the world. Thus, the handbook's chapters and related texts provide scholars, students, and admirers of Persian poetry and prose with practical and direct access to the intricacies of the Persian literary world through a chronological account of key moments in the formation of this enduring literary tradition. The related handbook (also edited by Kamran Talattof), Routledge Handbook of Post Classical and Contemporary Persian Literature covers Persian literary works from the 17th century to the present.

Exploring education policy through newspapers and social media offers an original, theorised, and empirically-based account of contemporary (re)presentations, (re)articulations, and (re)imaginings of education policy through news and new media. In its thorough exploration of the uses and effects of newspapers and Twitter in education policy, the book provides a detailed, research-based account of media influences, and opens up multiple future research agendas in media sociology and policy sociology in education. The authors place an important, analytical focus on mediatisation and social mediatisation or deep mediatisation, and how both have effects and affects in education policy and politics. Their analyses situate these, sociologically, within changing societies, changing media, and changing education policy. The book also explores the effects of datafication and digitalisation of the social in all forms of media and their manifestations in morphing imbrications between the global, the national, and the local in education policies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, scholars, and higher degree research students in the domains of media sociology and policy sociology of education. It also will be of interest to policy makers and politicians in education, teacher unions and education activists, journalists, and those concerned about the impacts of the decline in legacy media and the surveillance and commercialisation possibilities of new media.

Exploring education policy through newspapers and social media offers an original, theorised, and empirically-based account of contemporary (re)presentations, (re)articulations, and (re)imaginings of education policy through news and new media. In its thorough exploration of the uses and effects of newspapers and Twitter in education policy, the book provides a detailed, research-based account of media influences, and opens up multiple future research agendas in media sociology and policy sociology in education. The authors place an important, analytical focus on mediatisation and social mediatisation or deep mediatisation, and how both have effects and affects in education policy and politics. Their analyses situate these, sociologically, within changing societies, changing media, and changing education policy. The book also explores the effects of datafication and digitalisation of the social in all forms of media and their manifestations in morphing imbrications between the global, the national, and the local in education policies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, scholars, and higher degree research students in the domains of media sociology and policy sociology of education. It also will be of interest to policy makers and politicians in education, teacher unions and education activists, journalists, and those concerned about the impacts of the decline in legacy media and the surveillance and commercialisation possibilities of new media.

Another Mother gives voice to women who become mothers through the routes of adoption, surrogacy and egg donation, and their silent partners - the birth mothers, surrogate mothers and egg donors - who make motherhood possible for them. Exploring experiences of motherhood beyond the biological mother raising her child, Everington draws on interviews and a range of interdisciplinary approaches to produce illuminating personal testimonies which expand our understanding of what it means to be a mother. The life writing narratives also examine the unique and hidden relationships that exist between adopters and birth mothers, egg donors and women who become mothers through egg donation, and surrogates and women who become mothers through surrogacy. Offering a fresh approach in life writing, using hybrid form encompassing edited interview, re-imagined scenes, poetry, personal essay and quotation collage, this topical book is recommended for anyone interested in motherhood studies, gender and women's studies, life writing studies, the sociology of reproduction, creative non-fiction writing approaches, oral history, and ethnography studies.

This book comprises what may be called exercises in 'comparative cinema'. Its focus on endings, near-endings and 'late style' is connected with the author's argument that comparative criticism itself may constitute an endgame of criticism, arising at the moment at which societies or individuals relinquish primary adherence to one tradition or medium. The comparisons embrace different works and artistic media and primarily concern works of literature and film, though they also consider issues raised by the interrelationship of language and moving and still images, as well as inter- and intra-textuality. The works probed most fully are ones by Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Harun Farocki, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Chang-dong Lee, Roman Polanski, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul Schrader, while the key recurrent motifs are those of dusk, the horizon, the labyrinth, and the ruin.

This book presents a complementary study of lexicalist approaches and constructionist approaches in Linguistics. Specific topics discussed include different versions of semantic roles, predicate decomposition, event structures, argument realizations, and cognitive construction grammars. For decades, the relationship between certain concepts and constructions along with related issues of verb-construction associations have been perennially taxing issues for both lexicalist and constructionist approaches alike. Indeed, in Chinese, unmatched verb-construction associations and the much richer alternate realizations pose very difficult problems. Based on a comparative study, the authors make an attempt to account for the possible correspondence between the delicacy of argument setting and the principles of their realization. They also account for the integration of construction with verbs in terms of their coherent conceptual contents. The resultant newly developed model throws new light on the thorny Chinese problems. The book will appeal to scholars and students studying cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics, computational linguistics, and also natural language processing. The book also brings up some new analysis of Chinese data for both researchers and learners of Modern Chinese.

Despite the urgent need to develop understandings of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the light of the current situation in the Middle East, the role of violence and reconciliation in Palestinian and Israeli literature and film has received only brief treatment. This book is intended to fill that void; that is to explore how Israelis and Palestinians view and depict themselves and each other in situations that lead to either violence or reconciliation, and the ways in which both parties define themselves in relation to one another. The book examines selected Palestinian and Israeli literary works and a small number of films and their tacit assumptions about Israeli Jews. It will attempt to look at, among other questions a) is violence perceived as a means of empowerment, b) is there connection between imaginary violence in literature and actual violence, and what is the nature of the association between creative writers and violence? (eg. popular writer Ghassan Kanafani who is also a spokesman for the violent PFLP).

Seha, the traditional wise man-fool in Jewish Morocco is a popular fictional hero in simple yet rich tales, playful yet witty enough to provide life lessons with commitment to social fairness and mutual respect. In this collection of tales, the authors introduce readers to their grandparents and the teaching they imparted. Through humorous Seha tales, the authors transmit deeply engrained Jewish values, accentuated in accompanying socio-historical commentaries which shed light on the evolution of Seha as a popular fictional hero as well as on processes of social change and modernization experienced by Moroccan Jews, who were influenced by movements in three nations that impact their identity, namely Israel, France, and Morocco.

For advertisers and news publishers, brand sponsored content has offered attractive solutions to problems of ad-avoidance and financing journalism. This book is an investigation into the practices, possibilities and problems of sponsored editorial content across various national and regional contexts. Sponsored editorial content is material with similar qualities and format to content that is typically published on a platform or by a content provider, but which is paid for by a third party. Brand sponsored content may not be the remedy for ad-dependent media some advocates predicted but its expansion has impacted on the organisation, practices and identities of journalism in profound and far-reaching ways. This book explores the features and implications of content that blends, merges and disguises material that is sponsored with material that is or appears to be independent editorial. The chapters range across countries and regions from China and Israel to Europe and North America. Following a general introduction, authors address political and commercial sponsorship across production, content and audience research, developing and combining these in innovative ways to advance the study of paid-for content in contemporary digital journalism. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Digital Journalism.

Queering Wolverine in Comics and Fanfiction: A Fastball Special interrogates the ways in which the Marvel Comics character Wolverine is a queer hero and examines his representation as an open, vulnerable, and kinship-oriented, queer hero in both comics and fanfiction. Despite claims that Wolverine embodies Reagan-era conservatism or hegemonic hyper-masculinity, Wolverine does not conform to gender or sex norms, not only because of his mutant status, but also because his character, throughout his publication history, resists normalization, making him a site for a queer-heroic futurity. Rather than focus on overt queer representations that have appeared in some comic forms, this book explores the queer representations that have preceded Wolverine’s bisexual and gay characterizations, and in particular focuses on his porous and vulnerable body. Through important, but not overly analyzed storylines, representations of his open body that is always in process (both visually and narratively), his creation of queer kinships with his fellow mutants, and his eroticized same-sex relationships as depicted in fan fiction, this book traces a queer genealogy of Wolverine,. This book is ideal reading for students and scholars of comics studies, cultural studies, gender studies, sexuality studies and literature.

This book revolves around educating recently arrived immigrant youth in the US who are emergent bilinguals. Drawing on a seven-year research collaboration with three ESL teachers in an urban secondary school in the US, it addresses questions around taking a critical approach to language and literacy education and what this looks like in everyday practice, as well as how recently arrived youth and emergent bilinguals participate in critical language and literacy education, and what can be learned and developed as a result. The chapters illustrate the praxis of critical language and literacy education undertaken by everyday ESL teachers; curricular materials and pedagogical practices that promote youths' engagement with, and analysis of, words and worlds; and finally, a methodological and relational approach to researching with classroom teachers. The book introduces teaching practices such as dialogic problem-posing, translanguaging and translation, the use of multimodal texts, and youth research on language. Arguing for the potential power of critical language and literacy education for immigrant youth and their teachers, this book will benefit educators, researchers, and graduate students in the fields of language and literacy, second language acquisition (SLA), ESL and TESOL pedagogy, and in curriculum studies, education of immigrant children and youth, and multicultural issues in education.

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is an increasingly popular educational approach given its dual focus on enabling learners to acquire subject-matter through an additional language, while learning this second language in tandem with content. This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of recent CLIL developments, illustrating how CLIL has been uniquely conceptualized and practiced across educational and geographical contexts. Divided into six sections, covering language and language teaching, core themes and issues, contexts and learners, CLIL in practice, CLIL around the world and a final section looking forward to future research directions, every chapter provides a balanced discussion of the benefits, challenges and implications of this approach. Representing the same diversity and intercultural understanding that CLIL features, the chapters are authored by established as well as early-career academics based around the world. The Routledge Handbook of Content and Language Integrated Learning is the essential guide to CLIL for advanced students and researchers of applied linguistics, education and TESOL.

This volume illuminates how creative representations remain sites of ongoing struggles to engage with animals in indigenous epistemologies. Traditionally imagined in relation to spiritual realms and the occult, animals have always been more than primitive symbols of human relations. Whether as animist gods, familiars, conduits to ancestors, totems, talismans, or co-creators of multispecies cosmologies, animals act as vital players in the lives of cultures. From early days in colonial contact zones through contemporary expressions in art, film, and literature, the volume's unique emphasis on Southern Africa and North America - historical loci of the greatest ranges of species and linguistic diversity - help to situate how indigenous knowledges of human-animal relations are being adapted to modern conditions of life shared across species lines.

This volume brings together work by renowned scholars in the field of foreign/second/heritage languages and literatures, who employ a variety of scholarly tools to examine opportunities associated with literature as a force for rehumanizing and invigorating target language (TL) education in the 21st century. Offering viable avenues for reconciling historic differences between language pedagogues and literature educators, their work demonstrates that language pedagogy and literary studies are not divergent or competing disciplines separated by firm barriers, but rather convergent, interdependent, mutually beneficial, and genuinely complementary areas of inquiry. Each chapter foregrounds the multilayered value of target language literary education, aligning it with competencies that reside at the core of broader contemporary educational and societal priorities and aspirations. The contributors connect literature education to a wide array of goals, including not only literacy, communicative competencies, critical reading, and critical thinking, but also social engagement, global citizenship, intercultural sensitivity, and symbolic competence. Without minimizing the significant challenges facing language educators today, Rehumanizing the Language Curriculum argues in various ways for rehumanizing language education as the most effective means for overcoming pressing challenges, for addressing urgent priorities, and for approaching our full potential within the diversity of this vibrant community of scholarship and practice. "Rehumanizing the Language Curriculum should be compulsory reading for educators wishing to integrate language and literature teaching. This is a welcome and much needed contribution to rehumanizing language education in the 21st century." -Werner Delanoy, University of Klagenfurt "Featuring an international cast of contributors, this volume provides new insights into the role of literature in 21st century language education. Through various theoretical, ideological, and pedagogical lenses, the chapters present innovative and thought-provoking ways to reconcile the language-content divide and teach language and literature as interdependent parts of a whole. The result is a volume that encourages readers to value and embrace the range of disciplinary content and scholarly perspectives comprising language programs." -Kate Paesani, University of Minnesota "This wide-ranging collection highlights the importance of literature education in the language classroom, critiquing reductionist views of language education and making insightful connections between areas such as literary reading, deep reading, language education and general educational competencies. A thoughtful and often provocative collection, it provides a variety of lenses for understanding the ways in which second language learners can engage with literature, and a clear illustration of the immense world of new possibilities that is opened up when using literature." -Amos Paran, University College London "Rehumanizing the Language Curriculum is an ambitious, wide-ranging, yet readable collection of chapters which makes us rediscover the role of literature in language education. Addressing current issues such as intercultural communication, ecology, and diversity, this book proves the practicality and versatility of literature. In the gloomy educational environment in which pedagogical effects are mistakenly visualized statistically, uniformly, or even financially, the multifaceted approaches illustrated in this volume are a must for language teachers and scholars in any context." -Masayuki Teranishi, University of Hyogo, Japan

In Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric, Mara Lee Grayson calls attention to the complicity of academic institutions and the discipline(s) of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies in the simultaneous perpetuation and denial of anti-Jewish racism. Despite the persistence of antisemitism and Christian hegemony in the United States and its academic institutions, and despite a growing body of antiracist and anti-oppressive scholarship, antisemitism remains largely unaddressed in disciplinary scholarship, curricula, and pedagogy. This book seeks to (begin to) fill that gap by exploring how the rhetoric through which Jewish identity is conceptualized and weaponized by the white supremacist imaginary essentializes Jewish identities and obscures the racist aims and character of antisemitism. Through rhetorical analysis, historical context, and personal narrative, and drawing upon original phenomenological research, Grayson highlights how deeply embedded antisemitic ideologies impact the lived experiences of Jewish teachers, students, and scholars, and perpetuate white supremacy. This book addresses concerns both experiential and rhetorical, illuminates the rhetorical, historical, political, and racial dynamics of antisemitism, and exposes the limitations of existing discourses of whiteness and (anti)racism. This book gestures toward a future in which, through a more nuanced and productive discourse, we can better support Jewish educators and students and engage Jewish members of the discipline as better accomplices in antiracism. "I take this book personally. Grayson's theoretical framework, historical overview, personal anecdotes, and phenomenological research locate antisemitism nestled in the heart of the white supremacist imaginary. I felt such sadness, anger, and pain reading this book-recognizing myself as a Jew in its stark reflection-and yet her words also charge me, explicitly in my Jewishness, with the urgent need to join others in imagining a more just world through cooperative action and frank dialogue. It's a powerful and vibrant contribution to our field." -Eli Goldblatt, Co-Author, with David Jolliffe, of Literacy as Conversation: Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities

In Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric, Mara Lee Grayson calls attention to the complicity of academic institutions and the discipline(s) of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies in the simultaneous perpetuation and denial of anti-Jewish racism. Despite the persistence of antisemitism and Christian hegemony in the United States and its academic institutions, and despite a growing body of antiracist and anti-oppressive scholarship, antisemitism remains largely unaddressed in disciplinary scholarship, curricula, and pedagogy. This book seeks to (begin to) fill that gap by exploring how the rhetoric through which Jewish identity is conceptualized and weaponized by the white supremacist imaginary essentializes Jewish identities and obscures the racist aims and character of antisemitism. Through rhetorical analysis, historical context, and personal narrative, and drawing upon original phenomenological research, Grayson highlights how deeply embedded antisemitic ideologies impact the lived experiences of Jewish teachers, students, and scholars, and perpetuate white supremacy. This book addresses concerns both experiential and rhetorical, illuminates the rhetorical, historical, political, and racial dynamics of antisemitism, and exposes the limitations of existing discourses of whiteness and (anti)racism. This book gestures toward a future in which, through a more nuanced and productive discourse, we can better support Jewish educators and students and engage Jewish members of the discipline as better accomplices in antiracism. "I take this book personally. Grayson's theoretical framework, historical overview, personal anecdotes, and phenomenological research locate antisemitism nestled in the heart of the white supremacist imaginary. I felt such sadness, anger, and pain reading this book-recognizing myself as a Jew in its stark reflection-and yet her words also charge me, explicitly in my Jewishness, with the urgent need to join others in imagining a more just world through cooperative action and frank dialogue. It's a powerful and vibrant contribution to our field." -Eli Goldblatt, Co-Author, with David Jolliffe, of Literacy as Conversation: Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities

"An in-depth look at three important French-language women writers who tackle gender stereotypes, desire, the body, language and empowerment, this richly documented study is rigorous, thorough, illuminating and highly readable, with broader implications for contemporary feminism and women's writing within and beyond France and Quebec. A major contribution." (Lori Saint-Martin, Professor of Literary Studies, University of Quebec in Montreal) This book is the first comparative study of the work of Francophone authors Annie Ernaux (France), Nancy Huston (Alberta and France) and Nelly Arcan (Quebec) and explores their representation of sex, sexuality and the body from a feminist perspective. In particular, this study examines their narrative treatment of dominant sexual discourses, sexual difference and diverse feminine bodily experience. In so doing, this book reveals these writers' distinctive contribution to contemporary women's writing in French and different feminisms, which takes the form of a unique, "frank" French feminism. This frank French feminist approach, this book shows, is concerned with tackling gender inequality, sexism and misogyny, but also recognises the difficulties involved in feminist action, and acknowledges that adherence to allegedly oppressive gender stereotypes can actually prove enjoyable and empowering for women. This book examines the authors' earliest to latest publications and a broad range of genres and media, including fictional and autofictional novels, autobiographies, critical essays, photo-texts, diaries, journals, illustrated oeuvres, media addresses and newspaper articles. This book project was the Winner of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Contemporary Women's Writing in French.

Taking a dialogic approach, this edited book engages in analysis and description of dialogic discourse in a number of different educational contexts, from early childhood to tertiary, with an international team of contributors from Australia, Finland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The chapters focus mostly on dialogic face-to-face discourse, with some examples of online interactions, and feature insights from educational linguistics, particularly the work of Michael Halliday. While the contributors come from a range of theoretical backgrounds, they all share an interest in language in use, and engage in close analysis of transcripts of naturally-occurring interaction. Taking inspiration from Alexander and other theorists, they employ a fine-grained and analytic approach to the exploration of their data. The authors make use of the linguistic tools and models of language in society, in order to examine the turn-by-turn unfolding of the interaction. The authors relate their insights from disparate forms of linguistic analysis to elements of Alexander's (2020) dialogic framework, situating the discourse in its contexts and discussing the pedagogical implications of the linguistic choices at play. In presenting this work from a range of situations and perspectives the authors strive to demonstrate how dialogic discourse plays out in educational contexts across the world. The book aims to foster further research in this direction and to inspire educators to explore dialogic discourse for themselves. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including literacy researchers, linguists, teachers and teacher educators, as well as graduate students.

Georgian: A Comprehensive Grammar constitutes a complete reference work addressing all major elements of Modern Georgian grammar and usage. It provides a systematic and accessible description of the language's phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax. The focus is on contemporary spoken and written usage, with attention devoted throughout to differences of register and genre. Points are illustrated with examples drawn from a range of authentic written and recorded sources such as press, radio, and television. The grammar is designed for a wide readership including students of Georgian, particularly at the intermediate and advanced levels, as well as scholars of Georgian and theoretical linguistics.

In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is presented in full, with newly established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeats's poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeats's poetry to date, explaining specific references, and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet. In this third volume, Yeats's poetry of the first decade of the twentieth century is brought into sharp focus, revealing the extent of his efforts to re-fashion a style that had already made him a well-known poet. All of the major modes in Yeats's earlier work are subject to radical re-imagining in these years, from poetic narrative founded in Irish myth, in poems such as 'Baile and Aillinn' and 'The Old Age of Queen Maeve', to the symbolist drama-poetry of The Shadowy Waters, here edited in its two (completely different) versions of 1900 and 1906. In a decade when the theatre was one of Yeats's principal concerns, his lyric poems, which were becoming increasingly explicit in personal terms, began to discover new intensities of conversational pitch and mythic resonance. Poems such as 'The Folly of Being Comforted', 'Adam's Curse', 'No Second Troy', and 'The Fascination of What's Difficult' are given close attention in this new edition, alongside topical and epigrammatic pieces that are often passed over in accounts of Yeats's development. The evolving complexities of Yeats's personal and political lives are crucial to his artistic development in these years, and the commentary gives these generous attention, showing how the poetry both feeds upon and often transcends the circumstances of its composition. The volume offers strong evidence for this decade as a crucial one in Yeats's poetic life, in which the poet created wholly new registers for his verse as well as new dimensions for his imaginative vision.

This book examines the issues of ecological crisis and sustainable development through critical reading of literary texts. By analysing writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Amitav Ghosh, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hannah Arendt, and Lawrence Buell, it discusses themes like oriental representations of ecological consciousness; environmental evocations; misogyny and its postmodern creations; tracing nature's footprints in English literature; statelessness and consequent environmental refugees; ecocriticism and comics; and, absolute trust in the goodness of the earth. The volume argues that within the ambit of debates between ecological threats and socio-economic concerns, culture plays a vital role particularly in relation to parameters such as identity and engagement, memory and projection, gender and generations, inquiry and learning, wellbeing and health. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, English literature, social anthropology, gender studies, sustainable development, environmental studies, ecological studies, development studies, and post-colonial studies.

Romantic Egypt: Abyssal Ground of British Romanticism traces the historical, cultural and intellectual affiliations between Ancient Egypt and Romantic-period Britain and Germany, including the influences contributed by European thought, politics, and interventions such as Napoleon's 1799 Egyptian Campaign. Until the contributions of Napoleon's expedition to scientific knowledge of Ancient Egyptian monuments and ruins, Egypt had been largely swathed in mystical explanations of its past, its achievements, its beliefs, and its cultural importance; however, the increased knowledge about Ancient Egypt competed with the allure of a more mythically imbued antiquity in the Romantic imagination. Romantic Egypt argues that this balance between knowing and not-knowing, between deciphering and imagining a golden-age Egypt, between enlightened thought and mysticism, was essential to the development of the Romantic imaginary because, for the Romantics, western philosophy and art had their birth in the all-but-lost wisdom of Ancient Egypt.

The imagination is a distinctive cognitive feature of the human brain which enables us to navigate both the real world and fictional story worlds. Drawing from literary and cognitive science approaches, this book investigates contemporary British author Ian McEwan's differentiated portrayal of the imagination as a cognitive process, a result derived from that process or a vital social strategy that individuals use to daydream, mind-read, (self)deceive or manipulate. The book shows that McEwan's novels reveal the complex positive and negative potential of the imagination and engage, tease and push to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity on a range of narrative levels.