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.

Jewish American literature covers a broad range of genres and literary works. Some of the United States' most compelling literature centers on the American Jewish experience; some of the most acclaimed authors write from the heart of their experience as Jewish Americans. This ground-breaking work is intended to guide readers and those who advise readers in selecting fiction and nonfiction books that match specific reading interests. It is the first readers' advisory guide to Jewish American literature. Like other titles in the Genreflecting Advisory Series, the book organizes titles by genre--mysteries, thrillers, historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy, stories of romance, and literary fiction. In addition, there are chapters on holocaust literature and on biography/autobiography. More than 700 titles are categorized and described. Each chapter is further organized by subgenre and theme. Award-winning titles are noted, as are books that appeal to young adult readers and titles appropriate for book clubs and reading discussions. In addition, the author presents guidelines for building and maintaining a collection of Jewish literature, tips for advising readers, and lists of further resources for exploring the genre; making this a thorough and practical resource. Young adult and adult - Grades 9 and up.

This open access book will examine the implications of digitalization for the understanding of humanity, conceived as a community of intelligent agency. It addresses important topics across a range of social and behavioral theories and identifies a range of novel mechanisms and their social behavioral effects. Across the book, the author highlights the expansion of intelligent processing capability brought about by digitalization and the challenges this exposes for integrating artificial and human capabilities. It includes the altered effects of bounded rationality in problem solving and decision making; related changes in the perception of rationality, plus novel myopias and biases. It also seeks to address cognitive intersubjectivity, learning from performance and agentic self-generation; and the novel methods and patterns of reasoned thought which emerge in a digitalized world; and how these mechanisms will combine in making and remaking the world of human experience and understanding. This book examines the problematics and prospects for digitally augmented humanity. In doing so, it maps the terrain for a future science of augmented agency. It will have cross-disciplinary appeal to students and scholars of applied psychology, cognitive and behavioral science, organizational psychology and management, business, finance, and digital cultures and humanities.

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.

American Women's Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic vision of American Gothic by analyzing the various sectional or regional attempts to Gothicize what is most claustrophobic or peculiar about local history. Since women writers were often relegated to inferior status, it is especially compelling to look at women from the Gothic perspective. The regionalist Gothic develops along the line of difference and not unity-thus emphasizing regional peculiarities or a sense of superiority in terms of regional history, natural landscapes, immigrant customs, folk tales, or idiosyncratic ways. The essays study the uncanny or the haunting quality of "the commonplace," as Hawthorne would have it in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables, in regionalist Gothic fiction by a wide range of women writers between ca. 1850 and 1930. This collection seeks to examine how/if the regionalist perspective is small, limited, and stultifying and leads to Gothic moments, or whether the intersection between local and national leads to a clash that is jarring and Gothic in nature.

Interactive Media for Sustainability presents a conceptually rich, critical account of the design and use of interactive technologies to engage the public with sustainability. Treating interactive technologies as forms of mediation, the book argues that these technologies advance multiple understandings of sustainability. At stake are the ways sustainability encodes the complexity of interrelated social and natural systems, and how it conveys the malleability of the future. The book's argument is anchored in a diverse set of theoretical resources that include contemporary work in human-computer interaction (HCI), social theory, media studies, and the philosophy of technology, and is animated by a variety of examples, including interactive simulations, persuasive apps, digital games, art installations, and decision-support tools.

This book is the first full-length study of the development of Irish political print culture from the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 to the advent of the Hanoverian succession in 1714. Based on extensive analysis of publications produced in Ireland during the period, including newspapers, sermons and pamphlet literature, this book demonstrates that print played a significant role in contributing to escalating tensions between tory and whig partisans in Ireland during this period. Indeed, by the end of Queen Anne's reign the public were, for the first time in an Irish context, called upon in printed publications to make judgements about the behaviour of politicians and political parties and express their opinion in this regard at the polls. These new developments laid the groundwork for further expansion of the Irish press over the decades that followed.

This study examines the ways in which technological changes initiated during the Victorian period have led to the diminution of speech as a mode of critique. Much in the same ways that speech had been used to affirm intersubjectivity, print culture conditioned readers to accept uni-directional exchange of values and interests. It enabled the creation of a community of readers who would be responsive to the expansion of a industry and the emergence of a technical language and culture, a culture that precedes and predicts post-modern society. The purpose of this study is to employ Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (1849), Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), and George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866) to evidence how the growth of capitalist production and the development of new technologies of industry within the early- to mid-Victorian periods inspired the prioritization of the printed word over oratory and speech as a means for fulfilling the linguistic power exchanges found common in spoken discourse. Inventions such as Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer's high-speed printing press enabled mass production and low-cost readership among the working class, who experienced literacy on multiple levels: to educate themselves, to experience leisure and diversion, to confirm their religious beliefs, and to improve their labor skills. Much in the same ways that speech had been used to affirm intersubjectivity, print culture conditioned readers to accept uni-directional exchange of values and interests that would create a community of readers who would be responsive to the expansion of a new technical society and would eventually perform the routines of mechanized labor. This book employs Victorian novelists such as Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot to address representations of speech in fictional discourse. Critics like Nancy Armstrong and Garrett Stewart have considered these representations without addressing the ways in which print culture engendered and valued new forms of speech, forms which might re-engage critique of the human condition. More recent publications like The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics, by John Plotz, do not respond to the ways in which individuals use the collective voice of crowd formations to redefine and resituate their subjective identities. This book serves to fill this gap in Victorian studies. Victorian novels are not, of course, pure representations of Victorian reality. However, many working-class Victorians engaged texts as authentic representations of society. How working-class readers then reconstructed their personal narratives in actuality suggests the affects of social assimilation upon subjective identity and advances the claim that Victorian novels did not provide solutions to the social and economic maladies they reported. Rather, they contextualized social and cultural problems without recognizing the dangers of how the decontextualized imagination of the reader locates placement within the same ontological and epistemological assumptions. Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period is an informative study that will appeal to members of academic groups such as the British Women's Writer's Association and the North American Victorian Association. Although the book bears relevance to scholars and students of Victorian studies, it will also serve as a point of reference for curious readers engaged in studies of the effects of industrial technologies on language acquisition and dissemination during the nineteenth century.

This edited volume explores different meanings of media convergence and deconvergence, and reconsiders them in critical and innovative ways. Its parts provide together a broad picture of opposing trends and tensions in media convergence, by underlining the relevance of this powerful idea and emphasizing the misconceptions that it has generated. Sergio Sparviero, Corinna Peil, Gabriele Balbi and the other authors look into practices and realities of users in convergent media environments, ambiguities in the production and distribution of content, changes to the organization of media industries, the re-configuration of media markets, and the influence of policy and regulations. Primarily addressed to scholars and students in different fields of media and communication studies, Media Convergence and Deconvergence deconstructs taken-for-granted concepts and provides alternative and fresh analyses on one of the most popular topics in contemporary media culture. Chapter 1 is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

This volume is the first to attempt a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary analysis of the manuscript cultures implementing the pothi manuscript form (a loosely bound stack of oblong folios). It is the indigenous form by which manuscripts have been crafted in South Asia and the cultural areas most influenced by it, that is to say Central and South East Asia. The volume focuses particularly on the colophons featured in such manuscripts presenting a series of essays enabling the reader to engage in a historical and comparative investigation of the links connecting the several manuscript cultures examined here. Colophons as paratexts are situated at the intersection between texts and the artefacts that contain them and offer a unique vantage point to attain global appreciation of their manuscript cultures and literary traditions. Colophons are also the product of scribal activities that have moved across regions and epochs alongside the pothi form, providing a common thread binding together the many millions of pothis still today found in libraries in Asia and the world over. These contributions provide a systematic approach to the internal structure of colophons, i.e. their 'syntax', and facilitate a vital, comparative approach.

Today there is a reawakening interest in how language affects our lives. It comes with every threat to our safety and every promise of better times. It is a burning issue among minorities and a running debate between the attackers and defenders of our schools. Our deepest problems all are entangled with it: What shall be the official speech of emerging nations like Zambia and the Philippines, or even in certain areas of established ones like Belgium and Canada? What kind of English should be taught, or should there be no standard at all? How is government to make its regulations understandable? What are the verbal persuasions of television doing to our children? Which way does information flow, what are its biases, when does it inform and when conceal, and who benefits? Are the people who consider themselves experts in these matters as expert as they pretend to be? We feel adrift in a sea of words, and would welcome and a chart and a compass. Language aEURO" The Loaded Weapon offers a glimpse of what the recent study of language is beginning to tell us about these things. It explains in simple terms the essentials of linguistic form and meaning, and applies them to illuminate questions of correctness, truth, class and dialect, manipulation through advertising and propaganda, sexual and other discrimination, official obfuscation and the maintenance of power, and aEURO" most pervasive of all aEURO" language as the vital agent with which we build our worlds. Explaining language has been Dwight BolingeraEURO (TM)s life work, and as his invigorating new book amply shows he believes that what is true and important can also be made clear and pleasurable.

While the very existence of global literary studies as an institutionalised field is not yet fully established, the global turn in various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences has been gaining traction in recent years. This book aims to contribute to the field of global literary studies with a more inclusive and decentralising approach. Specifically, it responds to a double demand: the need for expanding openness to other ways of seeing the global literary space by including multiple literary and cultural traditions and other interdisciplinary perspectives in the discussion, and the need for conceptual models and different case studies that will help develop a global approach in four key avenues of research: global translation flows and translation policies, the post-1989 novel as a global form, global literary environments, and a global perspective on film and cinema history. Gathering contributions from international scholars with expertise in various areas of research, the volume is structured around five target concepts: space, scale, time, connectivity, and agency. We also take gender and LGBTQ+ perspectives, as well as a digital approach.

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.

In this book, renowned Korean studies scholar Peter H. Lee casts light on important works previously undervalued or suppressed in Korean literary history. He illuminates oral-derived texts as Koryo love songs, p'ansori, and shamanist narrative songs which were composed in the mind, retained in the memory, sung to audiences, and heard but not read, as well as other texts which were written in literary Chinese, the language of the learned ruling class, a challenge even to the reader who has been raised on the Confucian and literary canons of China and Korea. To understand fully the nature of these works, one needs to understand the distinction between what were considered the primary and secondary genres in the traditional canon, the relations between literature written in literary Chinese and that penned in the vernacular, and the generic hierarchy in the official and unofficial canons. The major texts the Koreans studied after the formation of the Korean states were those of the Confucian canon (first five, then eleven, and finally thirteen texts). These texts formed the basic curriculum of education for almost nine hundred years. * The literati who constituted the dominant social class in Korea wrote almost entirely in literary Chinese, the father language, which dominated the world of letters. This class, which controlled the canon of traditional Korean literature and critical discourse, adopted as official the genres of Chinese poetry and prose. Among the works in literary Chinese examined, this book explores the foundation myths of Koguryo and Choson, which center on the hero's deeds retold and sung to music composed for the purpose. Works in the vernacular discussed in this book include Kory? love songs, which reveal oral traditional features but have survived only in written form. Lyrics were often censored by officials as dealing with "love between the sexes." They intensely affect today's listener and reader, who try to reimagine the role of a general audience assumed to have the same background and concomitant expectations as the composers. The book also illuminates the works of the shaman, who occupied the lowest social strata. Shamans had to endure suffering imposed by authority, but their faith and rites brought solace to many, powerful and powerless, rich and poor. Some extant written texts are riddled with learned diction-Sino-Korean words and technical vocabulary from Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian traditions. This study explores how the unlettered shamans of the past managed to understand these texts and commit them to memory, especially given the fact that shamans depended more on aural intake and oral output than on the eye. The Story of Traditional Korean Literature opens the window to the fusion--as opposed to the conflict--of horizons, a dialogue between past and present, which will enable readers to understand and appreciate the text's unity of meaning. The aim of crosscultural comparison and contrast is to discover differences at points of maximum resemblance. Lee's comparative style is metacritical, transnational, and intertextual, involving also social and cultural issues, and also paying careful attention to be non-Eurocentric, nonpatriarchal, and nonelitist. This book will provide critical insights into both the works and the challenges of the topics discussed. It will be an important resource for those in Asian studies and literary criticism.

This handbook addresses the methodological problems and theoretical challenges that arise in attempting to understand and represent humour in specific historical contexts across cultural history. It explores problems involved in applying modern theories of humour to historically-distant contexts of humour and points to the importance of recognising the divergent assumptions made by different academic disciplines when approaching the topic. It explores problems of terminology, identification, classification, subjectivity of viewpoint, and the coherence of the object of study. It addresses specific theories, together with the needs of specific historical case-studies, as well as some of the challenges of presenting historical humour to contemporary audiences through translation and curation. In this way, the handbook aims to encourage a fresh exploration of methodological problems involved in studying the various significances both of the history of humour and of humour in history.

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