The coverage displayed here is predomi-nantly on sub-Saharan literary production, and with a - perhaps systemic - focus on important aspects of political history and socio-political structures (including marxian analyses of the 'public sphere') and such crucial arenas as religious discipline, the tension between tradition and modernity, ecological awareness, family, and gender. Most of the discussions are traditionally content-oriented, but there are at least two essays (on Soyinka's Ake and on Amma Darko's The Housemaid) that attempt to come to grips narratologically with the medium of prose fiction itself. A quartet of essays with a more general purview - in-cluding a refreshing demontage of exclusive obeisance to (Western) ecriture - is fol-lowed by a section on poets, some canonical, others emergent: Ogaga Ifowodo, Jack Mapanje, Olu Oguibe, Tanure Ojaide, Okot p'Bitek, Wole Soyinka, Lade Wosornu. Essays on fiction cover general topics (women's fiction; political writing in Nigeria; the nightmare of Biafra), and land-mark texts both anglophone (Chinua Achebe, Amma Darko, Festus Iyayi, Ng g wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka), francophone (Mariama Ba, Mongo Beti, and Ousmane Sembene), and - a novum for Matatu - hispanophone (Donato Ndongo). The theatre section has essays on Ama Ata Aidoo, Zakes Mda, Anne Tanyi-Tang, Soyinka, and Ahmed Yerima, as well as Ng g and Mugo. We are especially pleased to be able to offer accomplished original poetry, short stories, and a complete drama text. Four comprehensive essay-reviews (on literary criticism, cinema, graphic art, and traditional African society) round out this issue.

First published in 1970, this book is a faithful representation of the original edition of Beltaine, a literary magazine edited by W. B. Yeats from May 1899 to April 1900. Beltaine was the first of several magazines of the Irish Literary Theatre (later to become The Abbey Theatre) in which Yeats's editorial role was of utmost importance. It was an occasional publication and focused on promoting current works of Irish playwrights whilst challenging those of their English opponents. The magazine mainly consists of a series of essays on the theatre in Dublin, and supplementing these are explanations and discussions of new plays, excerpts from which are often included. This book will be of interest to those with an interest in Yeats, early nineteenth-century literature, and Irish theatre.

In this highly readable collection of essays, Francis Jarman ranges over such different topics as race, sex, the Second World War, detective novels, Kipling, torture, widow-burning, the Great Indian Novel, travel writing, the Srebrenica Massacre, the Indian Mutiny, and the reasons why writers write. What all the contributions have in common is a concern with problems of perception and communication across cultures. Complete with Notes, Bibliographies, and detailed Index.

The Real Western Canon

Larry McMurtry, the preeminent chronicler of the American West, celebrates the best of contemporary Western short fiction, introducing a stellar collection of twenty stories that represent, in various ways, the coming-of-age of the legendary American frontier.

Featuring a veritable Who's Who of the century's most distinctive writers, this collection effectively departs from the standard superstars of the Western genre. McMurtry has chosen a refreshing range of work that, when taken as a whole, depicts the evolution and maturation of Western writing over several decades. The featured tales are not so concerned with the American West of history and geography as they are with the American West of the imagination -- one that is alternately comic, gritty, individual, searing, and complex.

Contributors
Wallace Stegner * Dave Hickey * Dao Strom * Dagoberto Gilb * William Hauptman * Jack Kerouac * Ron Hansen * Diana Ossana * Robert Boswell * Tom McGuane Louise Erdrich * Max Apple * Mark Jude Poirier * Rick Bass * Jon Billman * Richard Ford * Raymond Carver * Annie Proulx * Leslie Marmon Silko * William H. Gass

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.

Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.

McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

The bibliography records doctoral and selected masters' theses (over 3,300 in all) from British and Irish universities in the field of Russian, Soviet and East European studies. This is broadly interpreted to include all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences as they relate to the area of Russia, the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Taken as a whole, the work probably forms the fullest and longest record of British and Irish postgraduate research in any sector of area studies. Besides its primary function as a bibliographic tool, it makes it possible to trace the effects of academic developments, institutional policies, and the changes in direction in this highly diversified field of study over the last hundred years. Entries are arranged by subject and area, supported by full author and subject indexes to aid searching. Dr Gregory Walker is a former Head of Slavonic and East European Collections at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The late John S.G. Simmons, OBE, was Senior Research Fellow and Librarian, All Souls College, Oxford.

"Collective Creativity "combines complex and ambivalent concepts. While 'creativity' is currently experiencing an inflationary boom in popularity, the term 'collective' appeared, until recently, rather controversial due to its ideological implications in twentieth-century politics. In a world defined by global cultural practice, the notion of collectivity has gained new relevance. This publication discusses a number of concepts of creativity and shows that, in opposition to the traditional ideal of the individual as creative genius, cultural theorists today emphasize the collaborative nature of creativity; they show that 'creativity makes alterity, discontinuity and difference attractive'. Not the Romantic "Originalgenie," but rather the agents of the 'creative economy' appear as the new avant-garde of aesthetic innovation: teams, groups and collectives in business and science, in art and digital media who work together in networking clusters to develop innovative products and processes. In this book, scholars in the social sciences and in cultural and media studies, in literature, theatre and visual arts present for the first time a comprehensive, inter- and transdisciplinary account of collective creativity in its multifaceted applications. They investigate the intersections of artistic, scientific and cultural practice where the individual and the collective merge, come together or confront each other.

H.G. Wells was one of the most prolific writers in the English language. He published over one hundred books, yet he is recognized by only two or three of his popular novels including "The Time Machine" and "War of the Worlds." Why has such a well known and widely read author from the nineteenth century almost disappeared from the bookshelves of the twenty-first century? "H.G. Wells at the End of His Tether" attempts to answer this question and others by examining his work from a nineteenth century perspective. Wells was a controversial figure. He was an avid socialist and a self-proclaimed prophet. He hated the Church and the Monarchy and spent much of his life promoting utopian ideals, world government and other radical concepts that are politically incorrect today. As he watched the First World War tear Europe asunder he wrote "The War to End War" and created a new label for that infamous conflict. He was a highly vocal anti-war journalist and often frustrated by how little impact he was making on the world. When the Second World War descended on Europe he became despondent as he approached the end of his political and literary tether.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"These engaged conversations are extremely well-informed, interesting, readable, and revealing. "Critics at Work" is a beautifully composed work and both fun and rewarding to read."
--Vincent B. Leitch, editor of "The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism,"

Featuring interviews with nineteen leading U.S. literary and cultural critics, Critics at Work offers a unique picture of recent developments in literary studies, critical theory, American studies, gay and lesbian studies, philosophy, and other fields. It provides informative, timely, and often provocative commentary on a broad range of topics, from the state of theory today and the prospects for cultural studies to the role of public intellectuals and the place of political activism. These conversations also elicit illuminating and sometimes surprising insights into the personal and professional lives of its contributors.

Individually, each interview gives a significant overview of a critic's work. Taken together, they provide an assessment of literary and cultural studies from the establishment of theory and its diffusion, in recent years, into various cultural and identity studies. In addition to the interviews themselves, the volume includes useful short introductions to each critic's work and biography.

Interviewees: K. Anthony Appiah, Lauren Berlant, Cathy Davidson, Morris Dickstein, Stanley Fish, Barbara Foley, Nancy Fraser, Gerald Graff, Alice Kaplan, E. Ann Kaplan, Robin D.G. Kelley, Paul Lauter, Louis Menand, Richard Ohmann, Andrew Ross, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jane Tompkins, Marianna Torgovnick, and Alan Wald.

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.

Texts about the nocturnal journey of the Prophet Muhammad (Mi'raj) abound in the Muslim world and outside. International attention has never been afforded to any version of text in any language of the Indonesian archipelago. One old version of the text from the area, the Malay Hikayat Mir'aj Nabi Muhammad is presented here in Malay and English translation. The introductory chapters place the text in a wider context in Indonesian literatures while the manuscript of the text (Cod.Or. Leiden 1713) is described in detail. The text and translation purport to enhance interest in this important text in the Muslim world as seen from the Malay/Indonesian perspective.

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.

Anarchism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Arts and Politics in Perspective contributes to the continuing debate on the encounter of the classical anarchisms (1860s 1940s) and the artistic and literary avant-gardes of the same period, probing its dimensions and limits. Case studies on Dadaism, decadence, fauvism, neo-impressionism, symbolism, and various anarchisms explore the influence anarchism had on the avant-gardes and reflect on avant-garde tendencies within anarchism. This volume also explores the divergence of anarchism and the avant-gardes. It offers a rich examination of politics and arts, and it complements an ongoing discourse with theoretical tools to better assess the aesthetic, social, and political cross-pollination that took place between the avant-gardes and the anarchists in Europe.

Fred Beiser, renowned as one of the world's leading historians of German philosophy, presents a brilliant new study of Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), rehabilitating him as a philosopher worthy of serious attention. Beiser shows, in particular, that Schiller's engagement with Kant is far more subtle and rewarding than is often portrayed. Promising to be a landmark in the study of German thought, Schiller as Philosopher will be compulsory reading for any philosopher, historian, or literary scholar engaged with the key developments of this fertile period.

"In a language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, the language contains neither ideas nor sounds that pre-exist the linguistic system, but only conceptual differences and phonic differences issuing from this system." (From the posthumous Course in General Linguistics, 1916.)
No one becomes as famous as Saussure without both admirers and detractors reducing them to a paragraph's worth of ideas that can be readily quoted, debated, memorized, and examined. One can argue the ideas expressed above - that language is composed of a system of acoustic oppositions (the signifier) matched by social convention to a system of conceptual oppositions (the signified) - have in some sense become "Saussure," while the human being, in all his complexity, has disappeared. In the first comprehensive biography of Ferdinand de Saussure, John Joseph restores the full character and history of a man who is considered the founder of modern linguistics and whose ideas have influenced literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and virtually every other branch of humanities and the social sciences.
Through a far-reaching account of Saussure's life and the time in which he lived, we learn about the history of Geneva, of Genevese educational institutions, of linguistics, about Saussure's ancestry, about his childhood, his education, the fortunes of his relatives, and his personal life in Paris. John Joseph intersperses all these discussions with accounts of Saussure's research and the courses he taught highlighting the ways in which knowing about his friendships and family history can help us understand not only his thoughts and ideas but also his utter failure to publish any major work after the age of twenty-one.

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.

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.