This book looks at the representation of viruses in rhetoric, politics, and popular culture. In utilizing Jean Baudrillard's concept of virality, it examines what it means to use viruses as a metaphor. For instance, what is the effect of saying that a video has gone viral? Does this use of biology to explain culture mean that our societies are determined by biological forces? Moreover, does the rhetoric of viral culture display a fundamental insensitivity towards people who are actually suffering from viruses? A key defining aspect of this mode of persuasion is the notion that due to the open nature of our social and cerebral networks, we are prone to being infected by uncontrollable external forces. Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Laclau, Baudrillard, and Zizek, it examines the representation of viruses in politics, psychology, media studies, and medical discourse. The book will help readers understand the potentially destructive nature of how viruses are represented in popular media and politics, how this can contribute to conspiracy theories around COVID-19 and how to combat such misinterpretations.

In the context of changing constructs of home and of childhood since the mid-twentieth century, this book examines discourses of home and homeland in Irish children's fiction from 1990 to 2012, a time of dramatic change in Ireland spanning the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and of unprecedented growth in Irish children's literature. Close readings of selected texts by five award-winning authors are linked to social, intellectual and political changes in the period covered and draw on postcolonial, feminist, cultural and children's literature theory, highlighting the political and ideological dimensions of home and the value of children's literature as a lens through which to view culture and society as well as an imaginative space where young people can engage with complex ideas relevant to their lives and the world in which they live. Examining the works of O. R. Melling, Kate Thompson, Eoin Colfer, Siobhan Parkinson and Siobhan Dowd, Ciara Ni Bhroin argues that Irish children's literature changed at this time from being a vehicle that largely promoted hegemonic ideologies of home in post-independence Ireland to a site of resistance to complacent notions of home in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

This book takes a fresh look at Tolkien's literary artistry from the points of view of both linguistics and literary history, with the aim of shedding light on the literary techniques used in The Lord of the Rings. The authors study Tolkien's use of words, style, narrative techniques, rhetoric and symbolism to highlight his status as literary artist. Dirk Siepmann uses a corpus stylistic approach to analyse Tolkien's vocabulary and syntax, while Thomas Kullmann uses discourse theory, literary history and concepts of intertextuality to explore Tolkien's literary techniques, relating them to the history of English fiction and poetry. Issues discussed include point of view, speeches, story-telling, landscape descriptions, the poems inserted into the body of the narrative, and the role of language in the characterization of the novel's protagonists. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of literature, corpus linguistics and stylistics, as well as Tolkien fans and specialists.

The vocabulary and sentence structures have been kept simple so that the stories can be enjoyed without too much help, and a Glossary is included in every book giving explanations of the more difficult words. With attractive colour illustrations accompanying the stories, the Asian Favourite Stories Series aims to encourage children to read stories with a familiar background for their enjoyment and pleasure.

This volume aims to address kinship in the context of global mobility, while studying the effects of technological developments throughout the 20th century on how individuals and communities engage in real or imagined relationships. Using literary representations as a spectrum to examine kinship practices, Lamia Tayeb explores how transnational mobility, bi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism honed, to some extent, the relevant authors' concerns with the family and wider kinship relations: in these literatures, kinship and the family lose their familiar, taken-for-granted aspect, and yet are still conceived as 'essential' spheres of relatedness for uprooted individuals and communities. Tayeb here studies writings by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Housseini and Nadia Hashimi, working to understand how transnational kinship dynamics operate when moved beyond the traditional notions of the blood relationship, relationship to place and identification with community.

Translocality in Contemporary City Novels responds to the fact that twenty-first-century Anglophone novels are increasingly characterised by translocality-the layering and blending of two or more distant settings. Considering translocal and transcultural writing as a global phenomenon, this book draws on multidisciplinary research, from globalisation theory to the study of narratives to urban studies, to explore a corpus of thirty-two novels-by authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand, Kiran Desai, and Xiaolu Guo-set in a total of ninety-seven cities. Lena Mattheis examines six of the most common strategies used in contemporary urban fiction to make translocal experiences of the world narratable and turn them into relatable stories: simultaneity, palimpsests, mapping, scaling, non-places, and haunting. Combining and developing further theories, approaches, and techniques from a variety of research fields-including narratology, human geography, transculturality, diaspora spaces, and postcolonial perspectives-Mattheis develops a set of cross-disciplinary techniques in literary urban studies.

This book examines the representation of masculinities in contemporary texts written by women who have immigrated into France or Canada from a range of geographical spaces. Exploring works by Leonora Miano (Cameroon), Fatou Diome (Senegal), Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem (Algeria), Ananda Devi (Mauritius), Ying Chen (China) and Kim Thuy (Vietnam), this study charts the extent to which migration generates new ways of understanding and writing masculinities. It draws on diverse theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial theory, affect theory and critical race theory, while bringing visibility to the many women across various historical and geographical terrains who write about (im)migration and the impact on men, even as these women, too, acquire a different position in the new society.

This volume is a study of human entanglements with Nature as seen through the mode of haunting. As an interruption of the present by the past, haunting can express contemporary anxieties concerning our involvement in the transformation of natural environments and their ecosystems, and our complicity in their collapse. It can also express a much-needed sense of continuity and relationality. The complexity of the question-who and what gets to be called human with respect to the nonhuman-is reflected in these collected chapters, which, in their analysis of cinematic and literary representations of sentient Nature within the traditional gothic trope of haunting, bring together history, race, postcolonialism, and feminism with ecocriticism and media studies. Given the growing demand for narratives expressing our troubled relationship with Nature, it is imperative to analyze this contested ground. "Chapter 6" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.