Why are the arts and humanities under attack? And how can they fight back? Historically these fields have suffered from a lack of prestige due to the utilitarian perspective of the "developed" world. While such utilitarian views have not been entirely fair on this branch of knowledge, the humanities themselves are partly to blame for this crisis, often not keeping pace with an increasingly changing society. It is therefore imperative that the humanities once and for all prove themselves relevant, leaving behind "departmentalized" approaches to academic knowledge and embracing the social mission that once epitomized humanistic study. Guided by such principles, this book features fourteen interdisciplinary studies that explore exciting intersections between different areas of academic research. These studies centre around three broad topics, which function as this volume's structural axes: identity, gender, and space and mobility (whether voluntary, as in tourism, or imposed, as in the case of migrations and persecutions). Altogether, the volume demonstrates that the humanities, far from being artificially detached from society, can actually study the enormously complex context that is contemporary Europe and crucially point the way to a better, more equitable world.

Lauded essayist takes to the high seas in hot pursuit of elusive birds, artistic ghosts, fathers and their memories, and above all, safe harbor.

"Among nature writers now working, Charles Hood may be my favorite." —Jonathan Franzen

Charles Hood is on a boat, wearing at least two life jackets as he scans the sky for seabirds and plumbs the depths of his—and our—relationship with the vast Pacific Ocean. Winner of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for his collection of essays A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature, Hood now brings his irrepressible curiosity to the lives of petrels, frigate birds, sea snakes, and flying fish. During our voyage, he resurrects Melville's journey on tempestuous seas to San Francisco, takes us into the storm-tossed minds and paintings of J. M. W. Turner and Winslow Homer, and surfaces the trauma—still reverberating—to ocean and family ecologies alike from World War II. As sharp and witty as ever, Hood also turns his scrutiny on a more personal history, navigating murky waters of harm and forgiveness, love and entrapment. Full of wonder, joy, and terror at the shared capacity of the ocean and the humans on its edges to nurture life and damage it irreparably, this book is a vessel, seaworthy and transportive.

2021 Bram Stoker Awards(R) Nominee for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction From the short story "The Lottery" to the masterworks The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson's popular, often bestselling works experimented with popular generic forms (melodrama, folktale, horror, the Gothic, and the Weird) to create a uniquely apocalyptic vision of America and its contradictions. With a Foreword by award-winning Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, this collection features comprehensive critical engagement with Jackson's works, including those that have received less scholarly attention. Among these are the novels The Road Through the Wall, The Bird's Nest, and Hangsaman, as well as Jackson's historical study, The Witchcraft of Salem Village. Also included are essays on Jackson's darkly humorous collections Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, on Stephen King's "literary friendship" with Jackson, on the little-known film adaptations Lizzie (1957) and Hosszu Alkony (Long Twilight) (1997), and the first-ever extended analysis devoted to Jackson's unpublished satirical cartoon sketches. The collection's five sections focus on Jackson's style, key themes, and influence; her politics and poetics of space; her treatment of the "monstrous" mother and monstrousness of motherhood; her representations of outsiders and minorities; and moving-image adaptations of her work.

Examining the research possibilities, debates and challenges posed by the emerging field of genetic translation studies, this book demonstrates how, both theoretically and empirically, genetic criticism can shed much-needed light on translators' archives, the translator figure and the creative process of translation. Genetic Translation Studies analyses a diverse range of translation materials including manuscripts, typographical proofs, personal papers, letters, testimonies and interviews in order to give visibility, body and presence to translators. Chapters draw on translations of works by authors such as Saint-John Perse, Nikos Kazantzakis, Rene Char, Antonio Lobo Antunes and Camilo Castelo Branco, in each case revealing the conflicts and collaborations between translators and other stakeholders, including authors, editors and publishers. Covering an impressive array of language contexts, from Portuguese, English and French to Greek, Finnish, Polish and Sanskrit, this book demonstrates the value of the genetic turn in translation studies and offers new ways of working with translator correspondences.

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.

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.

The present book features some introductory discussions on martial arts for the international audience and highlights in brief the complexities of translating the genre into English, often from a comparative literature perspective. Martial arts, also known as Kungfu or Wushu, refer to different families of Chinese fighting styles over many centuries. Martial arts fiction, or Wuxia literature, is a unique genre that depicts adventures of martial artists in ancient China. Understanding martial arts and the Chinese culture and philosophy behind them creates an intriguing experience, particularly, for non-Chinese readers; translating the literature into English poses unparalleled challenges for translators not only because of the culture embedded in it but also the fascinating martial arts moves and captivating names of many characters therein.

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.

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.

This book explores discourse mainly through corpus linguistics methods. Indeed, Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies has become a widely used approach for the critical (or non-critical) analysis of discourses in recent times. The book focuses on the analysis of different kinds of discourse, but most particularly on those which attempt to unveil social attitudes and values. Although a corpus methodology is deemed crucial in all research found here, it should not be inferred that a single, uniform technique is applied, but a wide variety of them, often shaped by the software which has been used. Also, more than one (qualitative or quantitative) methodology or drawing from various relevant sources is often called for in the critical analysis of discourses.

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.

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.

Are you a non-native English speaker? Are you often confronted with manuscript rejections because of poor language impeding comprehension of your paper? A Practical Guide to Scientific and Technical Translation is your solution. In this one-stop guide, two authors with extensive experience as reviewers and translators in a vast medley of scientific fields assist you to produce professional quality documents, whether through direct authoring in a language foreign to you or translation from an existing text. The book is not intended as a text on English grammar but as a troubleshooting guide to linguistic and style errors. We will help you overcome at least the most common problems here. Technical terminology searching and choice will also be covered with examples from a number of scientific (physics, chemistry) and engineering disciplines (aviation, transport, nuclear, environment, etc.), with advice on how to choose the right term for the right job. While the emphasis is on producing documents in English (the lingua franca of modern scientific literature), general translation concepts are also discussed. Hence, this book will also be useful to translators, and scientists who need to present their work in languages other than English.

"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.

This book offers an examination of Jeff Noon's iconoclastic debut novel, Vurt (1993). In this first book-length study of the novel, which includes an extended interview with Noon, Wenaus considers how Vurt complicates the process of literary canonization, its constructivist relationship to genre, its violent and oneiric setting of Manchester, its use of the Orphic myth as an archetype for the practice of literary collage and musical remix, and how the structural paradoxes of chaos and fractal geometry inform the novel's content, form, and theme. Finally, Wenaus makes the case for Vurt's ongoing relevance in the 21st century, an era increasingly characterized by neuro-totalitarianism, psychopolitics, and digital surveillance. With Vurt, Noon begins his project of rupturing feedback loops of control by breaking narrative habits and embracing the contingent and unpredictable. An inventive, energetic, and heartbreaking novel, Vurt is also an optimistic and heartfelt call for artists to actively create open futures.

This book explores the Indian Ocean world as it is produced by colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. It analyses the work of three contemporary authors who write the Indian Ocean as a region and world-Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Lindsey Collen-alongside maritime-imperial precursor Joseph Conrad. If postcolonial literatures are sometimes read as national allegories, this book presents an account of a different and significant strand of postcolonial fiction whose geography, in contrast, is coastal and transoceanic. This work imaginatively links east Africa, south Asia and the Arab world via a network of south-south connections that precedes and survives European imperialism. The novels and stories provide a vivid, storied sense of place on both a local and an oceanic scale, and in so doing remap the world as having its centre in the ocean and the south.

Anne Enright has publicly evidenced gender imbalance in publishing mentioning that men mostly praise books written by men. This book claims that Enright advocates for this cause by giving voice, in her literature, to those she considers the most repressed in the society she reports to. By telling stories of pregnancy, mothers, daughters and grandmothers, she empowers women, opens up possibilities for the future and give expression to opinions long buried. ANNE ENRIGHT Feminine Aesthetics: Writing, Mothering, Spiraling retraces Enright's prose and it comes up with an original account of her aesthetics: Enright writes in a spiral, her works reveals a spiraling aesthetics in which the spiral is feminine and it lifts women's reputation up. In this aesthetical process, the author uses narrative strategies to guide the reader in a circular-upward progression towards social self-awareness. In reading Enright's literary texts, the individual is led to perceive a self-reflection by exploring the inner self and the body of her characters. Then, carried by the spiral, the narrative promotes an elevation of the reader towards self-awareness of his or her materiality immersed in a great realm of human relations.

This book critically analyses Eminem's studio album releases from his first commercial album release The Slim Shady LP in 1999, to 2020's Music To Be Murdered By, through the lens of storytelling, truth and rhetoric, narrative structure, rhyme scheme and type, perspective, and celebrity culture. In terms of lyrical content, no area has been off-limits to Eminem, and he has written about domestic violence, murder, rape, child abuse, incest, drug addiction, and torture during his career. But whilst he will always be associated with these dark subjects, Mathers has also explored fatherhood, bereavement, mental illness, poverty, friendship, and love within his lyrics, and the juxtaposition between these very different themes (sometimes within the same song), make his lyrics complex, deep, and deserving of proper critical discussion. The first full-length monograph concerning Eminem's lyrics, this book affords the same rigorous analysis to a hip-hop artist as would be applied to any great writer's body of work; such analysis of 'popular' music is often overlooked. In addition to his rich exploration of Eminem's lyrics, Fosbraey furthermore delves into a variety of different aspects within popular music including extra-verbal elements, image, video, and surrounding culture. This critical study of his work will be an invaluable resource to academics working in the fields of Popular Music, English Literature, or Cultural Studies.

Maatian Ethics in a Communication Context explores the ethical principle of Maat: the guiding principle of harmony and order that permeated classical African political and civil life. The book provides a rigorous, communication-focused account of the ethical wisdom ancient Africans cultivated and is evidenced in the form of recovered written texts, mythology, stelae, prescriptions for just speech, and the hieroglyphic system of writing itself. Moving beyond colonial stereotypes of ancient Africans, the book offers insight into the African value systems that positioned humans as inextricably embedded in nature, and communication theory that anchors good communication in careful listening habits as the foundational moral virtue. Expanding on the work of Maulana Karenga, Molefi Kete Asante and other groundbreaking scholars, the book presents a picture of civilizations with a shared lust for life, a spiritual connection to scientific speech, and the veneration of ancestors as deeply connected to the pursuit of wisdom. Offering an examination of Maat from a specifically communication ethics perspective, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Communication Ethics, African philosophy, Rhetorical theory, Africana Studies and Ancient History.