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.

What are Monsters? Monsters are everywhere, from cyberbullies online to vampires onscreen: the twenty-first century is a monstrous age. The root of the word "monster" means "omen" or "warning", and if monsters frighten us, it's because they are here to warn us about something amiss in ourselves and in our society. Humanity has given birth to these monsters, and they grow and change with us, carrying the scars of their birth with them. This collection of original and accessible essays looks at a variety of contemporary monsters from literature, film, television, music and the internet within their respective historical and cultural contexts. Beginning with a critical introduction that explores the concept of the monster in the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Jack Halberstam, Elaine Showalter and more, the book takes a broad approach to the monster, including not only classic slasher films, serial killers (Bates Motel), the living dead (Game of Thrones) and aliens (District 9), but also hyper-contemporary examples like clones (Orphan Black), cyberbullies (Cyberbully), viral outbreaks (The Strain) and celebrities (Lady Gaga). Gender and culture are especially emphasized in the volume, with essays on the role of gender and sexuality in defining the monster (AHS Apocalypse) and global monsters (Cleverman, La Llorona). This compact guide to the monster in contemporary culture will be useful to teachers, students and fans looking to expand their understanding of this important cultural figure.

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.

Narrative Retellings presents pioneering work at the intersection of stylistics and narrative study to provide new insights into the diverse forms of fictional and factual narratives and their retellings. Common types of retelling, such as translation, adaptation, textual intervention and reader responses are reconceptualised in the chapters, and fresh insights are offered into experiences retold as autofiction, witness statements and advertorials on social media. From modernising the most cherished novels of Jane Austen to deciphering conflicting testimonials following the Hillsborough disaster, this volume reveals the complexities involved in all forms of narrative retellings. As such, it makes a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary study of stylistics and to the understanding of narrative texts.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines the representation of dictators and dictatorships in African fiction. It examines how the texts clarify the origins of postcolonial dictatorships and explore the shape of the democratic-egalitarian alternatives. The first chapter explains the 'neoliberal' period after the 1970s as an effective 'recolonization' of Africa by Western states and international financial institutions. Dictatorship is theorised as a form of concentrated economic and political power that facilitates Africa's continued dependency in the context of world capitalism. The deepest aspiration of anti-colonial revolution remains the democratization of these authoritarian states inherited from the colonial period. This book discusses four novels by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ahmadou Kourouma, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in order to reveal how their themes and forms dramatize this unfinished struggle between dictatorship and radical democracy.

From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writer

In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her.

From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn the richness of the author’s own.

Each page draws upon Levy’s life in exalting ways, encapsulating the wonderful precision and astonishing depth of her writing, as she seamlessly shifts between and meditates on questions of mortality, language, suburbia, gender, consumerism and the poetics of every day living. From the child born in South Africa, to her teenage years in Britain, to her travels across the world as a young woman, each page is a beautiful, tender composition of the questioning self: a portrait of Deborah Levy’s writing life and intellectual vitality in all of its dimensions.

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.

Words, Music, and the Popular: Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations opens up the notion of the popular, drawing useful links between wide-ranging aspects of popular culture, through the lens of the interaction between words and music. This collection of essays explores the relation of words and music to issues of the popular. It asks: What is popularity or 'the' popular and what role(s) does music play in it? What is the function of the popular, and is 'pop' a system? How can popularity be explained in certain historical and political contexts? How do class, gender, race, and ethnicity contribute to and complicate an understanding of the 'popular'? What of the popularity of verbal art forms? How do they interact with music at particular times and throughout different media?

This book discusses food in the context of the cultural matrix of India. Addressing topical issues in food and food culture, it explores questions concerning the consumption, representation and mediation of food. The book is divided into four sections, focusing on food fads; food representation; the symbolic valence of food; modes and manners of resistance articulated through food. Investigating consumption practices in both public and ethnic culture, each chapter introduces a fresh approach to food across diverse literary and cultural genres. The book offers a highly readable guide for researchers and practitioners in the field of literary and cultural studies, as well as the sociological fields of food studies, body studies and fat studies.

"Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse" offers an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of fundamental shifts in German cultural memory. Focusing on the resurgence of family stories in fiction, autobiography and in film, this study challenges the institutional boundaries of Germany's memory culture that have guided and arguably limited German identity debates. Essays on contemporary German literature are complemented by explorations of heritage films and museum discourse. Together these essays put forward a compelling theory of family narratives and a critical evaluation of generational discourse.

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry examines the transactions between the two main languages of Irish literature, English and Irish, and their formative role in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Daniela Theinova explores the works of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Biddy Jenkinson and Medbh McGuckian, combining for the first time a critical analysis of the language issue with a focus on the historical marginality of women in the Irish literary tradition. Acutely alert to the textures of individual poems even as she reads these against broader critical-theoretical horizons, Theinova engages directly with texts in both Irish and English. By highlighting these writers' uneasy poetic and linguistic identity, and by introducing into this wider context some more recent poets-including Vona Groarke, Caitriona O'Reilly, Sinead Morrissey, Ailbhe Darcy and Aifric Mac Aodha-this book proposes a fundamental critical reconsideration of major late-twentieth-century Irish women poets, and, by extension, the nation's canon.

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals was Iris Murdoch's major philosophical testament and a highly original and ambitious attempt to talk about our time. Yet in the scholarship on her philosophical work thus far it has often been left in the shade of her earlier work. This volume brings together 16 scholars who offer accessible readings of chapters and themes in the book, connecting them to Murdoch's larger oeuvre, as well as to central themes in 20th century and contemporary thought. The essays bring forth the strength, originality, and continuing relevance of Murdoch's late thought, addressing, among other matters, her thinking about the Good, the role and nature of metaphysics in the contemporary world, the roles of art in human understanding, questions of unity and plurality in thinking, the possibilities of spiritual life without God, and questions of style and sensibility in intellectual work.

The book examines prominent literary works from the past two decades by Russian women writers dealing with the Soviet past. It explores works such as Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmilla Ulitskaya, The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, and uncovers connecting thematic structures and features. Focusing on the concepts of displacement and postmemory, the book shows how these works have given voice to those on the margins of society and of 'great history' whose resistance was often silent. In doing so, these women writers portray the everyday experiences and trauma of displaced women and girls during the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers new insights into the importance of these women writers' work in creating and preserving cultural memory in post-Soviet Russia.

This book explores the history of women's engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation-of style, mode, voice, genre and language-has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as 'other'. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.

This edited volume is an inquiry into the representation of intimate relationships in a diverse array of media including cinema, arts, literature, picture books, advertising and popular music. It examines artistic portrayal of intimate relationships as a subversion of the boundaries between the representable and the non-representable, the real and the surreal, the visceral and the ideal, the embodied and the abstracted, the configured and transfigured. The essays focus on artistic mediation of intimacy in diverse relationships, including heterosexual, same-sex, familial, sibling' , political, and sadomasochistic. The collection offers new interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectives on current trends in the study of popular representations of intimacy; representations that affect and formulate people's most personal inspirations, desires, angsts, dreams and nightmares in an increasingly alienated, industrialized world.

Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference offers a new reading of Fanon's work challenging many of the reconstructions of Fanon in critical and postcolonial theory and in cultural studies, probing a host of crucial issues: the intersectionality of gender and colonial politics; the biopolitics of colonialism; Marxism and decolonisation; tradition, translation and humanism. It will be of particular value to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as to academics interested in Fanon and postcolonial studies generally. -- .

This book explores the intimate relationship between literature and class in England (and later Britain) from the Peasants' Revolt at the end of the fourteenth century to the impact of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. The book argues throughout that class cannot be seen as a modern phenomenon that occurred after the Industrial revolution but that class divisions and relations have always structured societies and that it makes sense to assume a historical continuity. The book explores a number of themes relating to class: class consciousness; class conflict; commercialisation; servitude; rebellion; gender relations; and colonisation. After outlining the history of class relations, five chapters explore the ways in which social class consciously and unconsciously influenced a series of writers: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Behn, Rochester, Defoe, Duck, Richardson, Burney, Blake and Wordsworth. -- .

Shakespeare and Gender guides students, educators, practitioners and researchers through the complexities of the representation of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's work. Informed by contemporary and early modern debates and insights into gender and sexuality, including intersectionality, feminist geography, queer and performance studies and fourth-wave feminism, this book provides a lucid and lively discussion of how gender and sexual identity are debated, contested and displayed in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Using close textual analysis hand-in- hand with diverse contextual materials, the book offers an accessible and intelligent introduction to how gender debates are integral to the plays and poems, and why we continue to read and perform them with this in mind. Topics and themes discussed include gendering madness, paternity and the patriarchy, sexuality, anxious masculinity, maternal bodies, gender transgression, and kingship and the male body politic.