This book is a detailed examination of one of the most important works of fantasy literature from the twentieth century. It goes through Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock considering how it engages with war on a personal and family level, how it plays with ideas of time as something fluid and disturbing, and how it presents mythology as something crude and dangerous. The book places Mythago Wood in the context of Holdstock's other works, noting in part how complex ideas of time have been a consistent element in his fiction. The book also briefly examines how the themes laid out in Mythago Wood are carried through into later books in the sequence as well as the Merlin Codex

This collection opens the geospatiality of "Asia" into an environmental framework called "Oceania" and pushes this complex regional multiplicity towards modes of trans-local solidarity, planetary consciousness, multi-sited decentering, and world belonging. At the transdisciplinary core of this "worlding" process lies the multiple spatial and temporal dynamics of an environmental eco-poetics, articulated via thinking and creating both with and beyond the Pacific and Asia imaginary.

This book examines South Africa's post-apartheid culture through the lens of affect theory in order to argue that the socio-political project of the "new" South Africa, best exemplified in their Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings, was fundamentally an affective, emotional project. Through the TRC hearings, which publicly broadcast the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations, the African National Congress government of South Africa, represented by Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, endeavoured to generate powerful emotions of contrition and sympathy in order to build an empathetic bond between white and black citizens, a bond referred to frequently by Tutu in terms of the African philosophy of interconnection: ubuntu. This book explores the representations of affect, and the challenges of generating ubuntu, through close readings of a variety of cultural products: novels, poetry, memoir, drama, documentary film and audio anthology.

"A gripping family saga. . . . Page-turners are rarely written by scholars of the 15th century, but Castor wears her learning admirably lightly. Blood and Roses is nothing less than a ripping yarn." --The Indepedent (London) The Wars of the Roses tore England asunder. Over the course of thirty years, four kings lost their thrones, countless men lost their lives on the battlefield or their heads on the block, and others found themselves suddenly flush with gold. Yet until now, little has been written about the ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary time. Blood and Roses is a gripping, intimate story of one determined family conducting everyday business against the backdrop of a disintegrating society and savage civil war. Drawing on a rare trove of letters discovered in a tumbledown stately home, historian Helen Castor reconstructs the turbulent affairs of the Pastons through three generations of births, marriages, and deaths as they single-mindedly worked their way up from farmers to landed gentry. It is a remarkable chronicle of devotion, ambition, and survival that brings a remote and hazy era to vibrant new life.

This book shows how persecution is a condition that binds each in an ethical obligation to the other. Persecution is functionally defined here as an impinging, affective relation that is not mediated by reason. It focuses on the works and personal lives of Emmanuel Levinas-a phenomenological ethicist who understood persecution as an ontological condition for human existence-and Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis who proposed that a demanding superego is a persecuting psychological mechanism that enables one to sadistically enjoy moral injunctions. Scholarship on the work of Freud and Levinas remains critical about their objectivity, but this book uses the phenomenological method to bracket this concern with objective truth and instead reconstruct their historical biographies to evaluate their hyperbolically opposing claims. By doing so, it is suggested that moral actions and relations of persecution in their personal lives illuminate the epistemic limits that they argued contribute to the psychological and ontological necessity of persecuting behaviors. Object relations and intersubjective approaches in psychoanalysis successfully incorporate meaningful elements from both of their theoretical works, which is used to develop an intentionality of search that is sensitive to an unknowable, relational, and existentially vulnerable ethical subjectivity. Details from Freud's and Levinas' works and lives, on the proclivity to use persecution to achieve moral ends, provide significant ethical warnings, and the author uses them as a strategy for developing the reader's intentionality of search, to reflect on when they may use persecuting means for moral ends. The interdisciplinary nature of this research monograph is intended for academics, scholars, and researchers who are interested in psychoanalysis, moral philosophy, and phenomenology. Comparisons between various psychoanalytic frameworks and Levinas' ethic will also interest scholars who work on the relation between psychoanalysis and The Other. Levinas scholars will value the convergences between his ethics and Freud's moral skepticism; likewise, readers will be interested in the extension of Levinas' intentionality of search. The book is useful for undergraduate or graduate courses on literary criticism and critical theories worldwide.

The aim of this monograph is to present the traces of intercultural encounters between Poland and Latin America realized by means of literary translations produced in the post-war period. It considers various aspects of the reception of Polish translations of Spanish American prose in 1945-2005 by examining their presence on the book market in the communist times and after 1990 in free market conditions. The analyses of critical texts show the attitudes of Polish critics towards this prose over the years. Survey research presents motives, behaviours and needs developed in different epochs by Polish readers. The interdisciplinary character of the monograph involves methodology inspired by translation, reception and cultural studies, sociology of literature and intercultural semantics.

Early Modern Debts: 1550-1700 makes an important contribution to the history of debt and credit in Europe, creating new transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives on problems of debt, credit, trust, interest, and investment in early modern societies. The collection includes essays by leading international scholars and early career researchers in the fields of economic and social history, legal history, literary criticism, and philosophy on such subjects as trust and belief; risk; institutional history; colonialism; personhood; interiority; rhetorical invention; amicable language; ethnicity and credit; household economics; service; and the history of comedy. Across the collection, the book reveals debt's ubiquity in life and literature. It considers debt's function as a tie between the individual and the larger group and the ways in which debts structured the home, urban life, legal systems, and linguistic and literary forms.

Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy studies Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) in relation to maritime criticism. Juan-Jose Martin-Gonzalez draws upon the intersections between maritime criticism and postcolonial thought to provide, via an analysis of the Ibis trilogy, alternative insights into nationalism(s), cosmopolitanism and globalization. He shows that the Victorian age in its transoceanic dimension can be read as an era of proto-globalization that facilitates a materialist critique of the inequities of contemporary global neo-liberalism. The book argues that in order to maintain its critical sharpness, postcolonialism must re-direct its focus towards today's most obvious legacy of nineteenth-century imperialism: capitalist globalization. Tracing the migrating characters who engage in transoceanic crossings through Victorian sea lanes in the Ibis trilogy, Martin-Gonzalez explores how these dispossessed collectives made sense of their identities in the Victorian waterworlds and illustrates the political possibilities provided by the sea crossing and its fluid boundaries.

Specialised translation has received very little attention from academic researchers, but in fact accounts for the bulk of professional translation on a global scale and is taught in a growing number of university-level translation programmes. This book aims to provide three things. Firstly, it offers a description of what makes the approach to specialised translation distinctive from wider-ranging approaches to Translation Studies adopted by translation scholars and applied linguists. Secondly, unlike the traditional approach to specialised translation, this book explores a perspective on specialised translation that is much less focused on terminology and more on the function and reception of specialised (translated) texts. Finally, the author outlines a professionally-oriented hands-on approach to the teaching of specialised translation resulting from many years of teaching it to MA students. The book will be of interest to Translation Studies students and scholars, as well as professional translators who are interested in the theory on which their activity is based.

This book provides a social interpretation of written South African translation history from the seventeenth century to the present, considering how trends involving various languages have reflected ideologies and unequal power relations and focusing attention on translation's often hidden social operation. Translation is investigated in relation to colonial mercantilism, scientific knowledge of extraction, Christian missionary conversion, Islamic education, various nationalisms, apartheid oppression and the anti-apartheid struggle, neoliberalism, exclusion and post-apartheid social transformation by employing Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory. This book will be an essential resource for scholars, graduate students, and general readers who are interested in or work on the history and practice of translation and its cultural agents in the South African context.

Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice examines how the chronotope, which literally means "timespace," is an effective interpretive lens through which to understand the cultural and ideological significance of video games. Using 'slow readings' attuned to deconstruction along the lines of post-structuralist theory, gender studies, queer studies, continental philosophy, and critical theory, Mike Piero exposes the often-overlooked misogyny, heteronormativity, racism, and patriarchal structures present in many Triple-A video games through their arrangement of timespace itself. Beyond understanding time and space as separate mechanics and dimensions, Piero reunites time and space through the analysis of six chronotopes-of the bonfire, the abject, the archipelago, the fart as pharmakon, madness, and coupled love-toward a poetic meaning making that is at the heart of play itself, all in affirmation of life, equity, and justice.

This book investigates community interpreting services as a market offering that satisfies the needs of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) members of the Australian community, with an additional chapter on the Turkish context. Bringing together the disciplines of interpreting studies and management, the author analyses a variety of challenges which still arise in various fields of interpreting and suggest possible solutions, as well as future directions for other global contexts where changing demographics mean that community-based interpreting is increasingly relevant. Based on interviews with various stakeholders including directors, interpreters, and trainers in the private sector or state-run institutions, the book's main focus is the real experiences of people working on the ground in community interpreting. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, interpreting and migration studies, as well as interpreters and their trainers, and government policy-makers.