First published in 1938, this collection of stories set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley includes the O. Henry Prize-winning story "The Murder," as well as one of Steinbeck's most famous short works, "The Snake."

Here is an unexpected Gérard Genette, looking back at his life and time with humour, tenderness and lucidity. ‘Bardadrac’ is the neologism a friend of his once invented to name the jumbled contents of her handbag. A way of saying that one finds a little bit of everything in this book: memories of a suburban childhood, a provincial adolescence and early years in Paris marked by a few political commitments; the evocation of great intellectual figures, like Roland Barthes or Jorge Luis Borges; a taste for cities, rivers, women and music, classical or jazz; contingent epiphanies; good or bad ideas; true and false memories; aesthetic biases; geographical reveries; secret or apocryphal quotations; maxims and characters; asides, quips and digressions; reflections on literature and language, with an ironic take on the medialect, or dialect of the media; and other surprises. At the intersection, for instance, of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, Renard’s Journal, Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes and Perec’s I Remember, this whimsical abecedarium invites you to stroll and gather. Gérard Genette (1930-2018) was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and visiting professor at Yale University. Cofounder of the journal Poétique, he published extensively in the fields of literary theory, poetics and aesthetics, including, in English: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980), Figures of Literary Discourse (1982), Fiction and Diction (1993), Mimologics (1995), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence (1997), The Aesthetic Relation (1999), Essays in Aesthetics (2005).

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?

How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their foreign-sounding speech are thus performed in Anglo-American fiction and visual culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of, for, by the (white) people. Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later. The trajectory in between illustrates that the detective and mystery genres continue unabated their stock yellowface characters, who exude a magnetic field so powerful as to pull in Japanese anime. This universal drive to fashion a foil is ingrained in any will to power, so much so that even millennial China creates an "off-yellow," darker-hued Orient in Huallywood films to silhouette its global ascent.

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.

Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World contributes new methods for the study and interpretation of material religion found within literary landscapes. The poets of Hindu devotion are known for their intimate celebration of deities, and while verses over a thousand years old are still treasured, translated, and performed, little attention has been paid to the evocative sensorial worlds referenced by these literary compositions. This book offers a material interpretation of an understudied poem that defined an entire genre of South Asian literature -Tirukkovaiyar-the 9th-century Tamil poem dedicated to Shiva. The poetry of Tamil South India invites travel across real and imagined geography, naming royal patrons, ancient temple towns, and natural landscapes. Leah Elizabeth Comeau locates the materiality of devotion to Shiva in a world unique to the South Indian vernacular and yet captivating to audiences across time, place, and tradition.

Compelling memoir of Flora Veit-Wild and her relationship with the Zimbabwean novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist Dambudzo Marechera, one of Africa's most innovative and subversive writers and a significant voice in contemporary world literature. How shall I tell our story? I hear your voice ringing in mine. I struggle to disentangle a dense tapestry of memories. One thread will be caught up in another. Early images will embrace later ones. My gaze will often be filtered through your eyes, your poems. In the end I will not always be able to tell the original from the reflection. Just as you wrote, Time's fingers on the piano / play emotion into motion / the dancers in the looking glass never recognise us as their originals. This book is a memoir with a 'double heartbeat'. At its centre is the author's relationship with the late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, whose award-winning book The House of Hunger marked him as a powerful, disruptive, perhaps prophetic voice in African literature. Flora Veit-Wild is internationally recognised for her significant contribution to preserving Marechera's legacy. What is less known about Marechera and Veit-Wild is that they had an intense, personal and sexual relationship. This memoir explores this: the couple's first encounter in 1983, amidst the euphoria of the newly independent Zimbabwe; the tumultuous months when the homeless writer moved in with his lover and her family; the bouts of creativity once he had his own flat followed by feelings of abandonment; the increasing despair about a love affair that could not stand up against reality; and the illness of the writer and his death of HIV related pneumonia in August 1987. What follows are the struggles Flora went through once Dambudzo had died. On the one hand she became the custodian of his life and work, on the other she had to live with her own HIV infection and the ensuing threats to her health. Jacana: Southern Africa

This book traces the development of literary poetics after postmodernism and outlines the most important features of what is defined here as "post-postmodernism". This new literary form simultaneously recovers the characteristics of the traditional novel and abandons the ironic approach of postmodernism, while also retaining some postmodern narrative devices such as autofiction and metafiction. To render the global dimension of this phenomenon, this book focuses on the theme of the Second World War, an increasingly pivotal subject for historical novels in the twenty-first century worldwide. The study analyses the work of a variety of authors from several national literatures, focusing mainly on Roberto Bolano, William T. Vollmann and Jonathan Littell, and drawing comparison with other authors, such as Rachel Seiffert, Sarah Waters, Laurent Binet, Ian McEwan and Giorgio Falco.

In the English-speaking world, the Catholic Literary Revival is typically associated with the work of G. K. Chesterton/Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. But in fact the Revival's most numerous members were women. While some of these women remain well known?Muriel Spark, Antonia White, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day?many have been almost entirely forgotten. They include: Enid Dinnis, Anna Hanson Dorsey, Alice Thomas Ellis, Eleanor Farjeon, Rumer Godden, Caroline Gordon, Clotilde Graves, Caryll Houselander, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Jane Lane, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Alice Meynell, Kathleen Raine, Pearl Mary Teresa Richards, Edith Sitwell, Gladys Bronwyn Stern, Josephine Ward, and Maisie Ward. There are various reasons why each of these writers fell out of print: changes in the commercial publishing world after World War II, changes within the Church itself and in the English-speaking universities that redefined the literary canon in the last decades of the 20th century. Yet it remains puzzling that a body of writing so creative, so attuned to its historical moment, and so unique in its perspective on the human condition, should have fallen into obscurity for so long. The Catholic Women Writers series brings together the English-language prose works of Catholic women from the 19th and 20th centuries; work that is of interest to a broad range of readers. Each volume is printed with an accessible but scholarly introduction by theologians and literary specialists. The first volume in the series is Caryll Houselander's The Dry Wood. Houselander is known primarily for her spiritual writings but she also wrote one novel, set in a post-war London Docklands parish. There a motley group of lost souls are mourning the death of their saintly priest and hoping for the miraculous healing of a vulnerable child whose gentleness in the face of suffering brings conversion to them all in surprising and unexpected ways. The Dry Wood offers a vital contribution to the modern literary canon and a profound meditation on the purpose of human suffering.

The fragments and testimonia of the early Greek philosophers (often labeled the Presocratics) have always been not only a fundamental source for understanding archaic Greek culture and ancient philosophy but also a perennially fresh resource that has stimulated Western thought until the present day. This new systematic conception and presentation of the evidence differs in three ways from Hermann Diels's groundbreaking work, as well as from later editions: it renders explicit the material's thematic organization; it includes a selection from such related bodies of evidence as archaic poetry, classical drama, and the Hippocratic corpus; and it presents an overview of the reception of these thinkers until the end of antiquity. Volume I contains introductory and reference materials essential for using all other parts of the edition. Volumes II-III include chapters on ancient doxography, background, and the Ionians from Pherecydes to Heraclitus. Volumes IV-V present western Greek thinkers from the Pythagoreans to Hippo. Volumes VI-VII comprise later philosophical systems and their aftermath in the fifth and early fourth centuries. Volumes VIII-IX present fifth-century reflections on language, rhetoric, ethics, and politics (the so-called sophists and Socrates) and conclude with an appendix on philosophy and philosophers in Greek drama.

An Invitation to Biblical Poetry is an accessibly written introduction to biblical poetry that emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of poems and their openness to varieties of context. It demonstrates the irreducible complexity of poetry as a verbal art and considers the intellectual work poems accomplish as they offer aesthetic experiences to people who read or hear them. Chapters walk the reader through some of the diverse ways biblical poems are organized through techniques of voicing, lineation, and form, and describe how the poems' figures are both culturally and historically bound and always dependent on later reception. The discussions consider examples from different texts of the Bible, including poems inset in prose narratives, prophecies, psalms, and wisdom literature. Each chapter ends with a reading of a psalm that offers an acute example of the dimension under discussion. Students and general readers are invited to richer and deeper readings of ancient poems and the subjects, problems, and convictions that occupy their imagination.

One of the greatest supernatural stories ever told, The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs has enthralled and captivated audiences since it was first published.

A new, larger format edition of Rice's Architectural Primer. This beautifully illustrated book covers the grammar and vocabulary of British buildings, explaining the evolution of styles from Norman castles to Norman Foster. Its aim is to enable the reader to recognise, understand and date any British building. As Matthew Rice says, 'Once you can speak any language, conversation can begin, but without it communications can only be brief and brutish. The same is the case with Architecture: an inability to describe the component parts of a building leaves one tongue-tied and unable to begin to discuss what is or is not exciting, dull or peculiar about it.' With this book in your hand, buildings will break down beguilingly into their component parts, ready for inspection and discussion. There will be no more references to 'that curly bit on top of the thing with the square protrusions'. Fluent in the world of volutes, hood moulds, lobed architraves and bucrania, you will be able to leave a cathedral or country house with as much to talk about as a film or play. Complete with over 400 exquisite watercolour illustrations and hand-drawn annotations, this is a joyous celebration of British buildings and will allow you to observe and describe the world around you afresh.

The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics: A Hoot in the Light presents the latest research in animal perception and cognition in the context of rhetorical theory. Alex C. Parrish explores the science of animal signaling that shows human and nonhuman animals share similar rhetorical strategies-such as communicating to manipulate or persuade-which suggests the vast impact sensory modalities have on communication in nature. The book demonstrates new ways of seeing humans and how we have separated ourselves from, and subjectified, the animal rhetor. This type of cross-species study allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing a deeper and more inclusive history of rhetoric than ever before.

This book begins with a reflection on dichotomies in comparative studies of Chinese and Western literature and aesthetics. Critiquing an oppositional paradigm, Ming Dong Gu argues that despite linguistic and cultural differences, the two traditions share much common ground in critical theory, aesthetic thought, metaphysical conception, and reasoning. Focusing on issues of language, writing, and linguistics; metaphor, metonymy, and poetics; mimesis and representation; and lyricism, expressionism, creativity, and aesthetics, Gu demonstrates that though ways of conception and modes of expression may differ, the two traditions have cultivated similar aesthetic feelings and critical ideas capable of fusing critical and aesthetic horizons. With a two-way dialogue, this book covers a broad spectrum of critical discourses and uncovers fascinating connections among a wide range of thinkers, theorists, scholars, and aestheticians, thereby making a significant contribution to bridging the aesthetic divide and envisioning world theory and global aesthetics.

The study of scents and all things olfactory is thriving, a sign of the great interest that our information-based society feels for a sense that seems to offer a direct and immediate experience of reality. But smells resist description and representation, especially given that they are closely linked to individual personal experience, and their perception has changed through time and space in a myriad of ways. This volume aims to contribute to the flourishing multidisciplinary exchanges around smells by examining the question of their mediality, focusing on the mechanisms by which the olfactory experience, as well as the scents themselves, circulate and are diffused, but also by exploring the modes of smell as a medium in itself. Drawing on a wide variety of approaches, cultural zones, and historical periods, this volume gathers the contributions of twenty-one researchers who specialize in this field in order to explore the multiple aspects of olfactory culture, which characterizes and shapes our relations to smells. La richesse de l'actualite en matiere d'odeurs et d'odorat temoigne du vif interet de nos societes de l'information pour un sens qui semble offrir une saisie directe et immediate du reel. Circulant de maniere tres variable a travers le temps et l'espace, les odeurs font l'objet d'une perception qui resiste d'autant plus a la description et a la representation qu'elle reste individuelle et liee a l'histoire personnelle. Ce volume vise a contribuer aux echanges interdisciplinaires sur l'olfaction a travers la question de la medialite, en s'interrogeant sur les mecanismes par lesquels l'experience olfactive et les odeurs sont transmises et diffusees, mais aussi en explorant les modalites de l'odeur comme medium. Proposant une diversite d'approches, d'aires culturelles et de periodes, ce volume rassemble les contributions de vingt-et-un specialistes qui etudient comment la culture olfactive caracterise et construit nos rapports aux odeurs.

This book reveals the sense in which our postmodern societies are characterized by the obscene absence of the intellectual. The modern intellectual--who had once been associated with humanism and enlightenment-has in our day been replaced by media stars, talking heads, and technical experts. At issue is the ongoing crisis of democracy, under the aegis of the societe du spectacle and its vast networks of politically-induced idiocy, industrially-produced biocide, and militarily-provoked genocide. Spectacle fills the resulting moral and intellectual vacuum with electronic technologies of control, punishment, and destruction. This postmodern tyranny reduces intelligence to mechanistic, positivist, and grammatological models of inquiry, while increasing the segmentation, fragmentation, and dissolution of human existence. The apotheosis of the spectacle explains the intellectual void that lies at the heart of our postmodern decadence; it also accounts for the need to recuperate the humanist values of enlightenment promoted by the modern intellectual tradition.

This volume aims to address kinship in the context of global mobility, while studying the effects of technological developments throughout the 20th century on how individuals and communities engage in real or imagined relationships. Using literary representations as a spectrum to examine kinship practices, Lamia Tayeb explores how transnational mobility, bi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism honed, to some extent, the relevant authors' concerns with the family and wider kinship relations: in these literatures, kinship and the family lose their familiar, taken-for-granted aspect, and yet are still conceived as 'essential' spheres of relatedness for uprooted individuals and communities. Tayeb here studies writings by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Housseini and Nadia Hashimi, working to understand how transnational kinship dynamics operate when moved beyond the traditional notions of the blood relationship, relationship to place and identification with community.

The first of Chekhov's full-length dramas, Ivanov treads a fine line between broad comedy and tragic melodrama.

This book gathers a selection of essays on the multifaceted aspects of cyber culture in India, both online and offline. It presents an in-depth analysis of cyberspace and its components, while also exploring its lived reality. The respective contributions highlight theoretical perspectives that address questions of relationality regarding all aspects of cyber culture in India, from the physical to the virtual. Bearing in mind India's vast cultural diversity, which is shaped by different levels of political, social, and economic development, the book offers nuanced studies that analyze the complexities of cyberspace and digital culture in India. The book appeals to all readers interested in technology, cultural studies, online communication networks, feminism, virtual diasporas, and sociology.

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.