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.

Njabulo S. Ndebele's essays on South African literature and culture initially appeared in various publications in the 1980s. They encompass a period of trauma, defiance, and change the decade of the collapse of apartheid and the challenge of reconstructing a future. In 1991, the essays were collected under the current title of Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Here, this collection is reprinted without revision, together with an interview provoked by Albie Sachs paper Preparing Ourselves for Freedom. That it is possible to republish the essays without revision so many years after their first appearance is a tribute to Ndebele's prescience. The issues that he raises and the questions that he poses remain key to a people who, after apartheid, have started to rediscover the complex ordinariness of living in a civil 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.

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.

Fantasy author Neil Gaiman's 1996 novel Neverwhere is not just a marvelous self-contained novel, but a terrifically useful text for introducing students to fantasy as a genre and issues of adaptation. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock's briskly written A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere offers an introduction to the work; situates it in relation to the fantasy genre, with attention in particular to the Hero's Journey, urban fantasy, word play, social critique, and contemporary fantasy trends; and explores it as a case study in transmedial adaptation. The study ends with an interview with Neil Gaiman that addresses the novel and a bibliography of scholarly works on Gaiman.

This book examines the history of translation under European communism, bringing together studies on the Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Poland. In any totalitarian regime maintaining control over cultural exchange is strategically important, so studying these regimes from the perspective of translation can provide a unique insight into their history and into the nature of their power. This book is intended as a sister volume to Translation Under Fascism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and adopts a similar approach of using translation as a lens through which to examine history. With a strong interdisciplinary focus, it will appeal to students and scholars of translation studies, translation history, censorship, translation and ideology, and public policy, as well as cultural and literary historians of Eastern Europe, Soviet communism, and the Cold War period.

This book explores hybrid memoirs, combining text and images, authored by photographers. It contextualizes this sub-category of life writing from a historical perspective within the overall context of life writing, before taking a structural and cognitive approach to the text/image relationship. While autobiographers use photographs primarily for their illustrative or referential function, photographers have a much more complex interaction with pictures in their autobiographical accounts. This book explores how the visual aspect of a memoir may drastically alter the reader's response to the work, but also how, in other cases, the visual parts seem disconnected from the text or underused.

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.

This edited volume rethinks Masculinity Studies by breaking away from the notion of the perpetual crisis of masculinity. It argues that not enough has been done to distinguish patriarchy from masculinity and proposes to detox masculinity by offering a collection of positive representations of men in fictional and non-fictional texts. The editors show how ideas of hegemonic and toxic masculinity have been too fixed on the exploration of dominance and subservience, and too little on the men (and the male characters in fiction) who behave following other ethical, personal and socially accepted patterns. Bringing together research from different periods and genres, this collection provides broad, multidisciplinary insights into alternative representations of masculinity.

Written not so long after "Tolkien mania" first gripped the United States in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) has long been recognized as a classic of the fantasy genre, and the series of Earthsea books that followed on it over the next several decades earned its author both considerable sales and critical accolades. This new introduction to the text will closely contextualize the original novel in relation to its heady decade of composition and publication - a momentous time for genre publishing - and also survey the half century and more of scholarship on Earthsea, which has shifted in direction and emphasis many times over the decades, just as surely as Le Guin frequently adjusted her own sails when composing later works set in the fantasy world. Above all, this book positions A Wizard of Earthsea as perhaps an "old text" that nevertheless belongs in a "new canon," a key novel in the author's career and the genre in which it participates, and one that at once looks back to Tolkien and his own antecedents in masculinist early fantasy; looks forward to Le Guin's own continuing feminist and progressive education; and anticipates and indeed helped to shape young adult literature in its contemporary form.

This book examines Larkin's evocation of place and space, along with the opportunities for self-discovery offered by the act and thought of travel. From his canonical verse to his lesser-known juvenilia and dream diaries, this title unveils a new Larkin; a man whose religious, political and ontological affiliations are often as wide-ranging and experimental as the very form and symbolic licence used to express them. Whether exploring Larkin's fondness for deictics ('pointing' words, like here/there), his fascination with death, or his interest in the sexual opportunities of an itinerant lifestyle, this monograph provides fresh critical approaches bound to appeal to established Larkin scholars and newcomers alike.

This book shows how diverse, critical modern world narratives in prose fiction and film emphasize masculine subjectivities through affects and ethics. Highlighting diverse affects and mental states in subjective voices and modes, modern narratives reveal men as feeling, intersubjective beings, and not as detached masters of master narratives. Modern novels and films suggest that masculine subjectivities originate paradoxically from a combination of copying and negation, surplus and lack, sameness and alterity: among fathers and sons, siblings and others. In this comparative study of more than 30 diverse world narratives, Mooney deftly uses psychoanalytic thought, narrative theories of first- and third-person narrators, and Levinasian and feminist ethics of care, creativity, honor, and proximity. We gain a nuanced picture of diverse postpaternal postgentlemen emerging out of older character structures of the knight and gentleman.

This volume explores the importance of inter-generational oral culture and stories that transcend time, space, and boundaries transmitted historically from one generation to the next through proverbs, idioms, and folklore tales in different geographical and spatial contexts. These important stories and their embedded life lessons are introduced, explained, and supplemented with pre and post educational activities and lesson plans to be used as learning resources. The centering of orality as a tool and medium for educating the future generation is a reclamation and reaffirmation of Indigeneity, Indigenous knowledges. and non-hegemonic approaches to support students in a socio-culturally sustaining manner. Through this understanding, this book explores the interconnectedness between culture, traditions, language, and way of life through oral storytelling, sharing, and listening.

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.

Ranging across literature, theater, history, and the visual arts, this collection of essays by leading scholars in the field explores the range of places where British Romantic-period sociability transpired. The book considers how sociability was shaped by place, by the rooms, buildings, landscapes and seascapes where people gathered to converse, to eat and drink, to work and to find entertainment. At the same time, it is clear that sociability shaped place, both in the deliberate construction and configuration of venues for people to gather, and in the way such gatherings transformed how place was experienced and understood. The essays highlight literary and aesthetic experience but also range through popular entertainment and ordinary forms of labor and leisure.

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.