This book is a four-volume study on modern Chinese complex sentences, giving an overview and detailed analysis on the key attributes and three major types of this linguistic unit. Complex sentences in modern Chinese are unique in formation and meaning. The author proposes a tripartite classification of Chinese complex sentences according to the semantic relationships between the clauses, i.e., coordinate, causal, and adversative. The first volume defines Chinese complex sentences and makes detailed comparisons between the tripartite and dichotomous systems for the classification of complex sentences. It then thoroughly investigates causal complex sentences in their eight typical forms. The second volume analyses the coordinated type in the broad sense and the relevant forms, while the third focuses on adversative type, examining the major forms and implications for research and language teaching. The final volume looks into attributes of Chinese complex sentences as a whole, discussing the constituents, related sentence forms, and semantic and pragmatic relevance of complex sentences. The book will be a useful reference for scholars and learners of the Chinese language interested in Chinese grammar and language information processing.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

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.

Conversations with Edmund White brings together twenty-one interviews with an author known for chronicling gay culture. Ranging from a 1982 discussion of his early works to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews highlight White's predilections, his major achievements, and the pivotal moments of his long, varied career. Since the 1973 publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena, Edmund White (b. 1940) has become a major figure in literature and gay culture. White is, however, more than just a celebrated gay writer. He is an international man of letters, and his work crosses several genres. White's fiction includes an autobiographical trilogy-A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony-along with more recent novels such as Jack Holmes and His Friend and Our Young Man. White's love of French literature and culture is evident in biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, and his antipathy to American Puritanism suffuses his collected essays and memoirs and is on full display in two early nonfiction works that helped define the era of gay liberation: The Joy of Gay Sex, coauthored with Charles Silverstein, and States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, White has earned many distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award. White has been a generous interviewer, sharing his time and insights not only with major publications such as the Paris Review, but also with smaller online publications for more limited audiences. A lively commentator, White has never been afraid to speak his mind, even when the result has been public feuds with literary peers on both sides of the Atlantic.

While a number of recent works have linked magical realism to postcolonial trauma, this book expands the trauma-theory-based analysis of magical realism. Borrowing from the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, the study adapts his concept of chronotope to that of shock chronotope in order to describe unstable time-spaces marked by extreme events. Besides trauma theory, contemporary theories of representation formulated by Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj i ek, among others, corroborate specific literary analyses of magical realist novels by Caribbean, North American, and European authors. The study discusses a series of concepts, such as "spectacle" and "hyperreality," in order to create an analogy between the hyperreal, a spectacle without origins, and magical realism, a representation of events without a history, or a recreation of an absence that first needs to be acknowledged before it can be assigned any meaning. Magical realist hyperreality is meant to be a reconstruction of events that were "missed" in the first place because of their traumatic nature. While the magical realist hyperreal might not explain the unspeakable event, if only to avoid the risk of an amoral rationalization, it makes the ineffable be vicariously felt and re-experienced. This study establishes a somewhat unorthodox nexus between magical realist writing (viewed primarily as a postmodern literary phenomenon) and trauma (understood both as an individual and as an often invisible cultural dominant), and proposes the concept of "traumatic imagination" as an analytical tool to be applied to literary texts struggling to represent the unpresentable and to reconstruct extreme events whose forgetting has proven just as unbearable as their remembering. The traumatic imagination defines the empathy-driven consciousness that enables authors and readers to act out and/or work through trauma by means of magical realist images. Corroborated by elements of trauma theory, postcolonial studies, narrative theory, and contemporary theories of representation, the work posits that the traumatic imagination is an essential part of the creative process that turns traumatic memories into narratives. Magical realism lends traumatic events an expression that traditional realism could not, seemingly because the magical realist writing mode and the traumatized subject share the same ontological ground: being part of a reality that is constantly escaping witnessing through telling. Over more than half a century now, magical realism has demonstrated its versatility by affecting literary productions belonging to various cultural spaces and representing different histories of violence. This book examines novels by traumatized and vicariously traumatized authors who make extensive use of fantastic/magical elements in order to represent slavery, postcolonialism, the Holocaust, and war. The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction is an important book for magical realism- and trauma theory-based critical collections.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

This critical interdisciplinary volume investigates modern and contemporary Asian cultural products in the non-westernized transpacific context of Asian and Latin American intellectual and cultural connections. It focuses on the Latin American intellectual, literary, and cultural influences on Asia, which have long been overshadowed by the dominance of Europe/North America-oriented discourse and by the predominance of academic research by both Asian and western intellectuals that focuses only on the West. Moving beyond the western intellectual paradigm, the volume examines how Asian literature, films, and art interact with Latin American literature and ideas to reexamine, reconsider, and re-explore issues related to the two regions' historical traumas, cultural identities, indigenous/vernacular traditions, and peripheral global-ness. The volume argues that Asian and Latin American literary and cultural endeavors are part of these regions' broader efforts to search for the forms of modernity that best fit their unique sociohistorical and sociocultural conditions.

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.

This book focuses on a relatively neglected aspect of African literature. Tijan M. Sallah is a Gambian, and arguably the best known of the second generation of writers from that country. To date, he has published ten books: five collections of poetry, a volume of short stories, two edited anthology of poetry (the second one with Tanure Ojaide, the Nigerian poet), a literary biography of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist (coauthored with Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, currently Nigeria's Minister of Finance), and an ethnographic book on Wolof, the dominant ethnic group of the Senegambian people. Tijan M. Sallah won the Francis Hutchins award for literature in Berea College. Lenrie Peters, arguably the best-known Gambian author, and mentor to most members of the country's second-generation of writers including Sallah himself, Ebou Dibba, Nana Grey-Johnson, Sheriff Sarr and Gabriel Roberts, described Sallah as the most prolific, the most consistent, and the most original Gambian writer of his generation. This opinion is widely shared; for example, in reviewing Sallah's When Africa was a Young Woman for World Literature Today, Charles Larson, the American scholar of African literature, opined that "there is little question about Sallah's talents." Sallah writes using simple, accessible language but also demonstrates his adventurous side in his works (e.g., "Harrow Poems" in which he experiments with rhymes and quatrains). Gambian literature has suffered some neglect in African literary criticism. The reason for this lies in the erroneous belief that the country has produced little that is worthy of serious scholarly attention. To be sure, there already exists a fairly substantial body of critical works on the writings of Tijan Sallah; and many of them, again, are by well-known names in the field of literary criticism. Some of these scholars are Charles Larson, Tanure Ojaide, Emmanuel Obiechina, Ezenwa Ohaeto, Gareth Griffiths, Samuel Garren, Victoria Arana, Stewart Brown, Odun Balogun, Peter Nazareth, Ali Malhani, and Siga Fatima Jagne. As insightful as these writings are however, it is not often easy to access them, scattered as they are in disparate journals, edited books, and compendiums of essays. This book fills the gap by as the first book-length critical study both on Tijan M. Sallah and Gambian literature. The first part of the book delves into the background of the literature with a discussion of works by leading Gambian authors, including Lenrie Peters, Ebou Dibba and then Tijan Sallah. The core of the book then turns the focus on the works of Tijan Sallah. These chapters explore his growth and development as a writer and provide critical analyses into his major works. While some of the chapters take the works together in general thematic and stylistic discussion, others focus on specifically selected works, analyzing and studying them closely. At least two of the chapters adopt a specifically linguistic approach; another two locate the works within the trend of ecopoetry, an emerging genre of nature poetry; one explores Sallah's poems of convalescence, pointing out the therapeutic nature of the writings; and yet another employs the theory of phenomenology in carrying out an investigation of Sallah's poetry in comparison with the works of other major African poets. The final chapter is a detailed interview conducted with Sallah. It sheds light on his life, his Gambian background, and how this affects and influences his writings. Contemporary Literature of Africa: Tijan M. Sallah and Literary Works of The Gambia is important for all those interested in Gambian and African literatures, postcolonial writings and world literatures in general.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

A thoroughly revised and updated edition of Thomas C. Foster's classic guide--a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes, and contexts--that shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.

While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes--and the literary codes--of the ultimate professional reader: the college professor.

What does it mean when a literary hero travels along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower? Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature--a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower--and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.

This revised edition includes new chapters, a new preface, and a new epilogue, and incorporates updated teaching points that Foster has developed over the past decade.

Frank McCourt's glorious childhood memoir, Angela's Ashes, has been loved and celebrated by readers everywhere for its spirit, its wit and its profound humanity. A tale of redemption, in which storytelling itself is the source of salvation, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Rarely has a book so swiftly found its place on the literary landscape.

And now we have 'Tis, the story of Frank's American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank lands in New York at age nineteen, in the company of a priest he meets on the boat. He gets a job at the Biltmore Hotel, where he immediately encounters the vivid hierarchies of this "classless country," and then is drafted into the army and is sent to Germany to train dogs and type reports. It is Frank's incomparable voice -- his uncanny humor and his astonishing ear for dialogue -- that renders these experiences spellbinding.

When Frank returns to America in 1953, he works on the docks, always resisting what everyone tells him, that men and women who have dreamed and toiled for years to get to America should "stick to their own kind" once they arrive. Somehow, Frank knows that he should be getting an education, and though he left school at fourteen, he talks his way into New York University. There, he falls in love with the quintessential Yankee, long-legged and blonde, and tries to live his dream. But it is not until he starts to teach -- and to write -- that Frank finds his place in the world. The same vulnerable but invincible spirit that captured the hearts of readers in Angela's Ashes comes of age.

As Malcolm Jones said in his Newsweek review of Angela's Ashes, "It is only the best storyteller who can so beguile his readers that he leaves them wanting more when he is done...and McCourt proves himself one of the very best." Frank McCourt's 'Tis is one of the most eagerly awaited books of our time, and it is a masterpiece.

This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity. It focuses on such episodes in three nonfictional texts - John Kaminiates' Capture of Thessaloniki (904), Eustathios of Thessaloniki's Capture of Thessaloniki (1186), and Niketas Choniates' History (ca. 1204-17) - and the three extant twelfth-century Komnenian novels to consider how the authors' positions as both eyewitness and victim require an interpretive method that distinguishes witness literature from other kinds of writing about the past. Drawing on theoretical developments in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (such as Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer and Michel Foucault's biopolitics) and comparisons with modern examples (Elie Wiesel's Night and Primo Levi's If This is a Man), Witness Literature emphasizes the affective, subjective, and experiential in medieval Greek historical writing.

Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humor (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive rejuvenation of scholarly interest. "Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches" represents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts.First, the book shows the importance of Henry Junius Nott, a virtually unknown and forgotten writer who mined many of the principal subjects, themes, tropes, and character types associated with southern frontier humor, followed by an essay addressing how this humor genre and its ideological impact helped to stimulate a national cultural revolution. Several essays focus on the genre's legacy to the post-Civil War era, exploring intersections between southern frontier humor and southern local color writers--Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Sherwood Bonner. Mark Twain's African American dialect piece "A True Story," though employing some of the conventions of southern frontier humor, is reexamined as a transitional text, showing his shift to broader concerns, particularly in race portraiture.Essays also examine the evolution of the trickster from the Jack Tales to Hooper's Simon Suggs to similar mountebanks in novels of John Kennedy Toole, Mark Childress, and Clyde Edgerton and transnational contexts, the latter exploring parallels between southern frontier humor and the Jamaican Anansi tales. Finally, the genre is situated contextually, using contemporary critical discourses, which are applied to G. W. Harris's Sut Lovingood and to various frontier hunting stories.

The eight-volume set systematically studies the phonetic and lexical system and evolution of the Chinese language in three phases. The history of the Chinese language is generally split into three phases: 1) Old Chinese, the form of the Chinese language spoken between the 18th century BC and the 3rd century AD, 2) Middle Chinese, between the 4th century AD to around the 12th century AD, and 3) Modern Chinese, since the 13th century, comprised of an 'early modern' phase before the early 20th century and the contemporary period since. The first three volumes examine the phonetical systems of the language in each period and distinct changes across time, covering the initials system, finals system and tone system. The subsequent 5 volumes focus on lexical development throughout the different phases. The author also analyses basic issues of Chinese language study, the standardization of a modern common language and the foreign influence on the lexicon, helping us to better understand the history and development of the Chinese language. Illustrated with abundant examples, this comprehensive groundwork on Chinese phonetical history will be a must read for scholars and students studying Chinese language, linguistics and especially Chinese phonetics and lexicon.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is of interest to political theorists partly because of its association with anarchism and partly because it is thought to represent a turning point in the history of utopian/dystopian political thought and literature and of science fiction. Published in 1974, it marked a revival of utopianism after decades of dystopian writing. According to this widely accepted view The Dispossessed represents a new kind of literary utopia, which Tom Moylan calls a "critical utopia." The present work challenges this reading of The Dispossessed and its place in the histories of utopian/dystopian literature and science fiction. It explores the difference between traditional literary utopia and novels and suggests that The Dispossessed is not a literary utopia but a novel about utopianism in politics. Le Guin's concerns have more to do with those of the novelists of the 19th century writing in the tradition of European Realism than they do with the science fiction or utopian literature. It also claims that her theory of the novel has an affinity with the ancient Greek tragedy. This implies that there is a conservatism in Le Guin's work as a creative writer, or as a novelist, which fits uneasily with her personal commitment to anarchism.