Even though he was once one of Britain's most popular writers, the reputation of the poet and memoirist W.H. Davies has, in recent decades, gone into decline. Davies's colourful early life as a hobo and a tramp - captured by his most famous work The Autobiography of a Super Tramp - and his apparently 'innocent' poems about nature, tales about the seamier sides of life, his experiences on the road and verse portraits of those characters he met there - has led to the Welsh poet being placed under the cosy heading 'Georgian'. It has been a tag which does serious disservice to the tone, nature and ambition of Davies's lyrics. As poet and critic Michael Cullup shows in this brief but insightful exploration of the entirety of Davies's output - the memoirs, the short stories as well as the poems - there was a more complex personality than the one suggested by his public persona. True, he was a figure at home with the Georgian literary world - Edward Thomas and Hilaire Belloc were close friends - yet he was also capable of impressing more avant-garde talents like Ezra Pound and Jacob Epstein. In this bracing reappraisal Cullup judiciously undermines preconceived notions of Davies the writer to reveal a poetic imagination richer, more insightful, more thoughtful than that for which he is generally given credit. Included in this critical biography is a generous and illustrative selection of Davies's verse.

In this edited collection contributors examine key themes, sources and methods in contemporary African Philosophy, building on a wide-ranging understanding of what constitutes African philosophy, and drawing from a variety of both oral and written texts of different genres. Part one of the volume examines how African philosophy has reacted to burning issues, ranging from contemporary ethical questions on how to integrate technological advancements into human life; to one of philosophy's prime endeavours, which is establishing the conditions of knowledge; to eternal ontological and existential questions on the nature of being, time, memory and death. Part two reflects on the (re)definition of philosophy from an African vantage point and African philosophy's thrust to create its own canon, archive and resources to study African concepts, artefacts, practices and texts from the perspective of intellectual history. The volume aims to make a contribution to the academic debate on African philosophy and philosophy more broadly, challenging orthodox definitions and genres, in favour of a broadening of the discipline's self-understanding and locales. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African philosophy and comparative philosophy.

A translation of three works from the second half of the 13th century: Rutebeuf's Renart le Bestourné, the anonymous Le Couronnement de Renart and Jacquemart Gielée's Renart le Nouvel. These savage and highly entertaining satires are in a league of their own, and Renart le Nouvel contains important music which is reproduced in the text.

The Pro Milone numbers among Cicero's most famous speeches. In it he defends his friend T. Annius Milo against the charge of murdering P. Clodius Pulcher, Cicero's own archenemy. Clodius' death, Milo's trial, and their aftermath consumed Roman public life in 52 BC, involving every major political figure of the day. Although Cicero's defense failed, the published speech remains one of his finest, a fascinating document from a turbulent time, full of interest both historical and rhetorical. This edition, aimed at students and scholars alike, provides readers with the help that they need to appreciate the speech as a literary masterpiece and a historical text. Including a comprehensive introduction and a newly constituted Latin text, it provides detailed treatment of Cicero's language, style, and rhetorical techniques, as well as full discussion of the historical background and the larger social and cultural issues relevant to the speech.

In many parts of the world, oppositional publishing has emerged in contexts of state oppression. In South Africa, censorship laws were enacted in the 1960s, and the next decade saw increased pressure on freedom of speech and publishing. With growing restrictions on information, activist publishing emerged. These highly politicised publishers had a social responsibility, to contribute to social change. In spite of their cultural, political and social importance, no academic study of their history has yet been undertaken. This Element aims to fill that gap by examining the history of the most vocal and arguably the most radical of this group, Ravan Press. Using archival material, interviews and the books themselves, this Element examines what the history of Ravan reveals about the role of oppositional print culture.

The embrace of reception theory has been one of the hallmarks of classical studies over the last 30 years. This volume builds on the critical insights thereby gained to consider reception within Greek antiquity itself. Reception, like 'intertextuality', places the emphasis on the creative agency of the later 'receiver' rather than the unilateral influence of the 'transmitter'. It additionally shines the spotlight on transitions into new cultural contexts, on materiality, on intermediality and on the body. Essays range chronologically from the archaic to the Byzantine periods and address literature (prose and verse; Greek, Roman and Greco-Jewish), philosophy, papyri, inscriptions and dance. Whereas the conventional image of ancient Greek classicism is one of quiet reverence, this book, by contrast, demonstrates how rumbustious, heterogeneous and combative it could be.

Blood is life, its complex composition is finely attuned to our vital needs and functions. Blood can also signify death, while 'bloody' is a curse. Arising from the 2021 Darwin College Lectures, this volume invites leading thinkers on the subject to explore the many meanings of blood across a diverse range of disciplines. Through the eyes of artist Marc Quinn, the paradoxical nature of blood plays with the notion of self. Through those of geneticist Walter Bodmer, it becomes a scientific reality: bloodlines and diaspora capture our notions of community. The transfer of blood between bodies, as Rose George relates, can save lives, or as we learn from Claire Roddie can cure cancer. Tim Pedley and Stuart Egginton explore the extraordinary complexity of blood as a critical biological fluid. Sarah Read examines the intimate connection between blood and womanhood, as Carol Senf does in her consideration of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula.

This Element analyses the relationship between gender and literary letterpress printing from the early 20th century to the beginning of the 21st. Drawing on examples from modernist writer/printers of the 1920s to literary book artists of the early 21st, it offers a way of thinking about the feminist historiography of printing as we confront the presence and particular character of letterpress in a digital age. This Element is divided into four sections: the first, 'Historicizing' traces the critical histories of women and print through to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second section, 'Learning,' offers an analysis of some of the modes of discourse and training through which women and gender minorities have learned the craft of printing. The third section, 'Individualizing' offers brief biographical vignettes. The fourth section, 'Writing,' focuses on printers' own written reflections about letterpress. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Human encounters with the natural world are inseparable from the history of travel. Nature, as fearsome obstacle, a wonder to behold or a source of therapeutic refuge, is bound up with the story of human mobility. Stories of this mobility give readers a sense of the diversity of the natural world, how they might interpret and respond to it and how human preoccupations are a help or a hindrance in maintaining bio-cultural diversity. Travel writing has constantly shaped how humans view the environment from foreign adventures to flight-shaming. If much of modern travel writing has been based on ready access to environmentally damaging forms of transport how do travel writers deal with a practice that is destroying the world they claim to cherish? This Element explores human travel encounters with the environment over the centuries and asks, what is the future for travel writing in the age of the Anthropocene?

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.

Epistemic Freedom in Africa is about the struggle for African people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. The imperial denial of common humanity to some human beings meant that in turn their knowledges and experiences lost their value, their epistemic virtue. Now, in the twenty-first century, descendants of enslaved, displaced, colonized, and racialized peoples have entered academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives matter and they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems that are capable of helping humanity to transcend the current epistemic and systemic crises. Together, they are engaging in diverse struggles for cognitive justice, fighting against the epistemic line which haunts the twenty-first century. The renowned historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni offers a penetrating and well-argued case for centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world, whilst simultaneously making an equally strong argument for globalizing knowledge from Africa so as to attain ecologies of knowledges. This is a dual process of both deprovincializing Africa, and in turn provincializing Europe. The book highlights how the mental universe of Africa was invaded and colonized, the long-standing struggles for 'an African university', and the trajectories of contemporary decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall in South Africa. This landmark work underscores the fact that only once the problem of epistemic freedom has been addressed can Africa achieve political, cultural, economic and other freedoms. This groundbreaking new book is accessible to students and scholars across Education, History, Philosophy, Ethics, African Studies, Development Studies, Politics, International Relations, Sociology, Postcolonial Studies and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies. The Open Access versions Chapter 1 and Chapter 9, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429492204 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The transformations were brought about by events which included a worldwide economic depression, the Second World War, a tumultuous postwar recovery and the birth of a Chinese Communist nation. The Chinese constituted the most populous ethnic group on the island. Before the war, Chinese, who were members of the British empire because they were locally-born, were a minority. To bring both the local-born and China-born Chinese within the pale of British administration and jurisdiction, the authorities relied on intermediaries, that is, men who acted as the channel of communication between the British and the Chinese. This new book, therefore, approaches the topic by focussing on the public service career of Tan Chin Tuan, the highest-ranking non-European government official and spokesman for Chinese economic interests in the Legislative Council until 1955. It is not intended to be a biography of Tan. Instead, the first objective is to analyse the ways in which the colonial authorities tried to maintain law and order in a colony dominated by a migrant population during a period of major political transformations. The second aim is to document and examine the dimensions of Tan's public service career before the colony was granted a measure of self-government in 1955. Through this, a valuable case study is developed of how British colonial power made use of Chinese community leaders to liaise with and promote its rule over the community.

As the sun sets on a feverishly hot July evening, a young woman spies on her teenage neighbor, transfixed by what looks like an occult ritual intended to banish an ex-boyfriend. Alone in a new town and desperate to expel the claustrophobic memories of her own ex that have followed, the narrator decides to try to hex herself free from her past. She falls in with the neighbor and her witchy friend, exploring nascent supernatural powers as the boundaries of reality shift in and out of focus. But when the creaks and hums of her apartment escalate into something more violent, she realizes that she may have brought her boyfriend's presence-whether psychological or paranormal-back to haunt her. With astonishing emotional depth and clarity, Disturbance explores the fallout of abuse. Propulsive and wry, this razor-sharp debut twists witchcraft and horror into a powerful narrative of one woman's struggle to return to herself.

The Pro Milone numbers among Cicero's most famous speeches. In it he defends his friend T. Annius Milo against the charge of murdering P. Clodius Pulcher, Cicero's own archenemy. Clodius' death, Milo's trial, and their aftermath consumed Roman public life in 52 BC, involving every major political figure of the day. Although Cicero's defense failed, the published speech remains one of his finest, a fascinating document from a turbulent time, full of interest both historical and rhetorical. This edition, aimed at students and scholars alike, provides readers with the help that they need to appreciate the speech as a literary masterpiece and a historical text. Including a comprehensive introduction and a newly constituted Latin text, it provides detailed treatment of Cicero's language, style, and rhetorical techniques, as well as full discussion of the historical background and the larger social and cultural issues relevant to the speech.

Southern African Literatures is a major study of the work of writers from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia, written at a time of crucial change in the subcontinent. It covers a wide range of work from the storytelling of stone-age Bushmen to modern writing by renowned figures such as Es'kia Mphahlele, Nadine Gordimer and Andr Brink, encompassing traditional, popular and elite writing; literature in translation; and case studies based on topical issues. Michael Chapman argues that literary history in the southern African region is best based on a comparative method which, while respecting differences of language, race and social circumstance, seeks cultural interchange including "translations" of experience across linguistic and ethnic borders. Instead of perpetuating division, the study examines points of common reference, as it asks what makes a literary culture. Who are to be regarded as major and minor authors? What are the strengths and limita

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

The Sultanate of Oman is one of the few "good news" stories to have emerged from the Middle East in recent memory. This book traces the narrative of a little-known and relatively stable Arab country whose history of independence, legacy of interaction with diverse cultures, and enlightened modern leadership have transformed it in less than fifty years from an isolated medieval-style potentate to a stable, dynamic, and largely optimistic country. At the heart of this fascinating story is Oman's sultan, Qaboos bin Sa'id, friend to both East and West, whose unique leadership style has resulted in both domestic and foreign policy achievements during more than four decades in office. Exploring Oman from a historical perspective, Funsch examines how the country's unique blend of tradition and modernization has enabled it to succeed while others in the region have failed. Accounts of the author's own experiences with Oman's transformation add rich layers of depth, texture, and personality to the narrative.

This collection provides students and researchers with a new and lively understanding of the role of institutions in the production, reception, and meaning of literature in the period 1700-1900. The period saw a fundamental transition from a patronage system to a marketplace in which institutions played an important mediating role between writers and readers, a shift with consequences that continue to resonate today. Often producers themselves, institutions processed and claimed authority over a variety of cultural domains that never simply tessellated into any unified system. The collection's primary concerns are British and imperial environments, with a comparative German case study, but it offers encouragement for its approaches to be taken up in a variety of other cultural contexts. From the Post Office to museums, from bricks and mortar to less tangible institutions like authorship and genre, this collection opens up a new field for literary studies.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”

With those famous words unfolds a tale that renews the joy and caring that are Christmas. Whether we read it aloud with our family and friends or open the pages on a chill winter evening to savor the story in solitude, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a very special holiday experience.

It is the one book that every year will warm our hearts with favorite memories of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future — and will remind us with laughter and tears that the true Christmas spirit comes from giving with love.

With a heartwarming account of Dickens’s first reading of the Carol, and a biographical sketch.

First published in 1971, this major bibliography devoted to Africa's most populous country - Nigeria - is therefore a timely contribution which must be welcomed by all. The Bibliography of Nigeria contains over 5,400 entries in archaeology, all branches of anthropology, linguistic and relevant historical and sociological studies. Many of the entries carry indicative or informative annotations which have greatly enhanced the usefulness of the work. The history and culture of Africa constitutes a rich area of study and research which is attracting an ever-increasing number of scholars the world over. The new impetus which African studies is receiving in the major centre of learning today has added urgency to the long-neglected problem of bibliographical control of the vast literature. The dearth of bibliographies in the field of African studies has been a main source of frustration to all those working in this area. The book is divided into two parts: part one deals with Nigeria as a whole, and lists general works or those concerned with several regions or several ethnic groups. Part two is devoted to the various ethnic groups. An analytical table of contents, a comprehensive ethnic index, an author index and an index of Islamic studies, together with generous cross-referencing, ensure ready and easy location of individual entries.

The creation of texts preserves culture, literature, myth, and society, and provides invaluable insights into history. Yet we still have much to learn about the history of how those texts were produced and how the production of texts has influenced modern societies, particularly in smaller nations like Wales. The story of publishing in Wales is closely connected to the story of Wales itself. Wales, the Welsh people, and the Welsh language have survived invasion, migration, oppression, revolt, resistance, religious and social upheaval, and economic depression. The books of Wales chronicle this story and the Welsh people's endurance over centuries of challenges. Ancient law-books, medieval manuscripts, legends and myths, secretly printed religious works, poetry, song, social commentary, and modern novels tell a story of a tiny nation, its hardy people, and an enduring literary legacy that has an outsized influence on culture and literature far beyond the Welsh borders.

It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring" (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving-and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche-as ever.