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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > General
In this ground-breaking work, Bridget Orr shows that popular
eighteenth-century theatre was about much more than fashion,
manners and party politics. Using the theatre as a means of
circulating and publicizing radical Enlightenment ideas, many plays
made passionate arguments for religious and cultural toleration,
and voiced protests against imperial invasion and forced conversion
of indigenous peoples by colonial Europeans. Irish and
labouring-class dramatists wrote plays, often set in the
countryside, attacking social and political hierarchy in Britain
itself. Another crucial but as yet unexplored aspect of early
eighteenth-century theatre is its connection to freemasonry.
Freemasons were pervasive as actors, managers, prompters,
scene-painters, dancers and musicians, with their own lodges,
benefit performances and particular audiences. In addition to
promoting the Enlightened agenda of toleration and cosmopolitanism,
freemason dramatists invented the new genre of domestic tragedy, a
genre that criticized the effects of commercial and colonial
capitalism.
The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary
security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of
security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American
literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized
insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility
for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of
works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather,
Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a
cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and
insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to
appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely,
broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in
debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary
field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing
explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural
and political life.
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.
When the term 'dinosaur' was coined in 1842, it referred to
fragmentary British fossils. In subsequent decades, American
discoveries-including Brontosaurus and Triceratops-proved that
these so-called 'terrible lizards' were in fact hardly lizards at
all. By the 1910s 'dinosaur' was a household word. Reimagining
Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature approaches the
hitherto unexplored fiction and popular journalism that made this
scientific term a meaningful one to huge transatlantic readerships.
Unlike previous scholars, who have focused on displays in American
museums, Richard Fallon argues that literature was critical in
turning these extinct creatures into cultural icons. Popular
authors skilfully related dinosaurs to wider concerns about empire,
progress, and faith; some of the most prominent, like Arthur Conan
Doyle and Henry Neville Hutchinson, also disparaged elite
scientists, undermining distinctions between scientific and
imaginative writing. The rise of the dinosaurs thus accompanied
fascinating transatlantic controversies about scientific authority.
'Gripping, emotional, utterly engrossing' Lisa Ballantyne 'Stunning
writing and wonderful nuanced characterisation. I was hooked'
Rosamund Lupton A sweeping and turbulent drama about the anxieties
of post-war Britain, where one strong and inspirational young woman
looks to find her place, no matter the cost... Perfect for fans of
Maggie O'Farrell, Celeste Ng and Anne Tyler. 1957: Within a year of
arriving at an American airbase in Suffolk, the loving, law-abiding
Delaney family is destroyed. Did they know something they weren't
allowed to know? Did they find something they weren't supposed to
find? Only one girl has the courage to question what really went on
behind closed doors . . . Hedy's journey to the truth leads her to
read a manuscript that her talented twin brother had started months
before he died, a story inspired by an experience in the forest
surrounding the airbase perimeter. Only through deciding to finish
what her brother started does Hedy begin to piece together what
happened to her family. But would she have continued if she'd known
then what she knows now? Sometimes, it's safer not to finish what
you've started... Praise for Saskia Sarginson: 'An engrossing read
with endearing characters thrust into traumatic circumstances. It
stayed with me long after the last page' Lisa Ballantyne on How It
Ends 'Outstandingly good. Part thriller, part love story, I
guarantee you will not be able to put it down' Sun on The Twins
'Atmospheric, readable, beautifully evoked' Sunday Mirror on
Without You 'Stunning in its insight and beautifully written' Judy
Finnigan on The Twins 'This enthralling read will keep you up long
into the night' Ruth Ware on The Other Me 'A stunning writer with
deep insight into people, their thoughts and behaviour' NZ Women's
Weekly
Translation is a very important tool in our multilingual world.
Excellent translation is a sine qua non in the work of the Swedish
Academy, responsible for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In order to
establish a forum for discussing fundamental aspects of the
translation of poetry and poetic prose, a Nobel Symposium on this
subject was organized.The list of contributors includes Sture
Allen, Jean Boase-Beier, Philippe Bouquet, Anders Cullhed, Gunnel
Engwall, Eugene Eoyang, Efim Etkind, Inga-Stina Ewbank, Knut
Faldbakken, Seamus Heaney, Lyn Hejinian, Bengt Jangfeldt, Francis R
Jones, Elke Liebs, Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, Goeran Malmqvist, Shimon
Markish, Margaret Mitsutani, Judith Moffett, Mariya Novykova, Tim
Parks, Ulla Roseen, Emmanuela Tandello, Eliot Weinberger, Daniel
Weissbort, and Fran(oise Wuilmart.
This Companion offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction
to the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary movement that
responds to a world reconfigured by climate change and its effects,
from environmental racism and global migration to resource
impoverishment and the importance of the nonhuman world. It
addresses the twenty-first century recognition of an environmental
crisis - its antecedents, current forms, and future trajectories -
as well as possible responses to it. This books foregrounds
scholarship from different periods, fields, and global locations,
but it is organized to give readers a working context for the
foundational debates. Each chapter examines a key topic or theme in
Environmental Humanities, shows why that topic emerged as a
category of study, explores the different approaches to the topics,
suggests future avenues of inquiry, and considers the topic's
global implications, especially those that involve environmental
justice issues.
This state of the art collection offers fresh perspectives on why
intersections between literature, religion, and ethics can address
the fault lines of modernity and are not necessarily the cause of
modernity's 'faults.' From a diverse cohort of scholars from around
the world, with appointments in comparative literature and other
disciplines, the essays suggest that the imagined hegemony of a
Judeo-Christian Western project is neither exclusively true nor
productive. However, the essays also suggest that elements of the
Western religious traditions are important vectors for
understanding modernity's complicated relationship to the past.
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.
Beckett and Buddhism undertakes a twenty-first-century reassessment
of the Buddhist resonances in Samuel Beckett's writing. These
reverberations, as Angela Moorjani demonstrates, originated in his
early reading of Schopenhauer. Drawing on letters and archives
along with recent studies of Buddhist thought and Schopenhauer's
knowledge of it, the book charts the Buddhist concepts circling
through Beckett's visions of the 'human predicament' in a blend of
tears and laughter. Moorjani offers an in-depth elucidation of
texts that are shown to intersect with the negative and paradoxical
path of the Buddha, which she sets in dialogue with Western
thinking. She brings further perspectives from cognitive philosophy
and science to bear on creative emptiness, the illusory 'I', and
Beckett's probing of the writing process. Readers will benefit from
this far-reaching study of one of the most acclaimed writers of the
twentieth century who explored uncharted topologies in his fiction,
theatre, and poetry.
James Baldwin Review (JBR) is an annual journal that brings
together a wide array of peer-reviewed critical and creative work
on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. In addition to
these cutting-edge contributions, each issue contains a review of
recent Baldwin scholarship and an award-winning graduate student
essay. James Baldwin Review publishes essays that invigorate
scholarship on James Baldwin; catalyze explorations of the
literary, political, and cultural influence of Baldwin's writing
and political activism; and deepen our understanding and
appreciation of this complex and luminary figure. -- .
Phonographs, tapes, stereo LPs, digital remix - how did these
remarkable technologies impact American writing? This book explores
how twentieth-century writers shaped the ways we listen in our
multimedia present. Uncovering a rich new archive of materials,
this book offers a resonant reading of how writers across several
genres, such as John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, William S.
Burroughs, and others, navigated the intermedial spaces between
texts and recordings. Numerous scholars have taken up remix - a
term co-opted from DJs and sound engineers - as the defining
aesthetic of twenty-first century art and literature. Others have
examined modernism's debt to the phonograph. But in the gap between
these moments, one finds that the reciprocal relationship between
the literary arts and sonic technologies continued to evolve over
the twentieth century. A mix of American literary history, sound
studies, and media archaeology, this interdisciplinary study will
appeal to scholars, students, and audiophiles.
This Element describes for the first time the database of peer
review reports at PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the
world, to which the authors had unique access. Specifically, this
Element presents the background contexts and histories of peer
review, the data-handling sensitivities of this type of research,
the typical properties of reports in the journal to which the
authors had access, a taxonomy of the reports, and their sentiment
arcs. This unique work thereby yields a compelling and
unprecedented set of insights into the evolving state of peer
review in the twenty-first century, at a crucial political moment
for the transformation of science. It also, though, presents a
study in radicalism and the ways in which PLOS's vision for science
can be said to have effected change in the ultra-conservative
contemporary university. This title is also available as Open
Access on Cambridge Core.
It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred
feet high-a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors
that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm." In a book that
has become a classic, Sebastian Junger explores the history of the
fishing industry, the science of storms, and the candid accounts of
the people whose lives the storm touched. The Perfect Storm is a
real-life thriller that makes us feel like we've been caught,
helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding
or control. Winner of the American Library Association's 1998 Alex
Award.
How is tonight different from all other nights? For Jacob
Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army during the Civil War,
it is a question his commanders have already answered for him-on
Passover, 1862, he is ordered to murder his own uncle in New
Orleans, who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln. After
this harrowing mission, Jacob is recruited to pursue another enemy
agent, the daughter of a Virginia family friend. But this time, his
assignment isn't to murder the spy, but to marry her. Their
marriage, with its riveting and horrifying consequences, reveals
the deep divisions that still haunt American life today. Based on
real personalities such as Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy's Jewish
secretary of state and spymaster, and on historical facts and
events ranging from an African American spy network to the dramatic
self-destruction of the city of Richmond, All Other Nights is a
gripping and suspenseful story of men and women driven to the
extreme limits of loyalty and betrayal. It is also a brilliant
parable of the rift in America that lingers a century and a half
later: between those who value family and tradition first, and
those dedicated, at any cost, to social and racial justice for all.
In this eagerly awaited third novel, award-winning author Dara Horn
brings us page-turning storytelling at its best. Layered with
meaning, All Other Nights reinvents the most American of subjects
with originality and insight.
This book is a study of female virginity loss and its
representations in popular Anglophone literatures. It explores
dominant cultural narratives around what makes a "good" female
virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular
literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular
romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female
sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the
contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a
dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and
love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something
which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss.
This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been
negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of
virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the
romanticisation of the idea of "the right one" and "the right
time".
Living on his posh French estate with his elegant heiress wife, Tom
Ripley, on the cusp of middle age, is no longer the striving comer
of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Having accrued considerable wealth
through a long career of crime forgery, extortion, serial murder
Ripley still finds his appetite unquenched and longs to get back in
the game. In Ripley's Game, first published in 1974, Patricia
Highsmith's classic chameleon relishes the opportunity to
simultaneously repay an insult and help a friend commit a crime and
escape the doldrums of his idyllic retirement. This third novel in
Highsmith's series is one of her most psychologically nuanced
particularly memorable for its dark, absurd humor and was hailed by
critics for its ability to manipulate the tropes of the genre. With
the creation of Ripley, one of literature's most seductive
sociopaths, Highsmith anticipated the likes of Norman Bates and
Hannibal Lecter years before their appearance."
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Written Lives
(Paperback)
Javier Marias; Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
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In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most
intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marias is also the
translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad,
Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors
is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty
pieces recounting great writers' lives, "or, more precisely,
snippets of writers' lives." Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan
Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Bronte, Malcolm Lowry, and
Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals"), and "almost
nothing" in his stories is invented. Like Isak Dinesen (who
"claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a
field from a remarkable distance away"), Marias has a sharp eye.
Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is
'as American as April in Arizona, '" as is Oscar Wilde, who, in
debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, "remarking cheerfully,
'I am dying beyond my means.'" Faulkner, we find, when fired from
his post office job, explained that he was not prepared "to be
beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp."
Affection glows in the pages of Written Lives, evidence, as Marias
remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this
was the one with which I had the most fun."
This book aims to investigate the process of decision-making in
subtitling of feature films and entertainment series. The author
uses Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson,1986) to argue that the
technical, linguistic and translational constraints at work in
subtitling result in a curtailed target text, and illustrates this
argument by invoking examples drawn from the English-Polish
subtitles of films and television series available through the
subscription service Netflix. After introducing the current state
of research on audiovisual translation within and outside the
framework of translation studies, he presents the core concepts
underpinning Relevance Theory and explains how it can be used to
construct a model of the process of subtitling. This book will be
of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of
translation studies, audiovisual translation studies, and
communication studies.
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
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