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.

Surrealist women's writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers' work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment. Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Cesaire, Unica Zurn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet. -- .

Brief and original comment on Society and Institutions; Imagination, Heart, and Will; Reflection and Philosophy; and Religion, together with criticisms on various literary figures, philosophers, and public men.

Fourteen of the most important French literati discussed from both the personal and artistic viewpoints. The list includes: Gide, Giradoux, Mauriac, MacOrlan, Larbaud, Morand, Colette, the surrealists, Concteau, Green, de Montherland, Drieu la Rochelle, Romains, and Malrauz.

In many parts of the world, oppositional publishing has emerged in contexts of state oppression. In South Africa, censorship laws were enacted in the 1960s, and the next decade saw increased pressure on freedom of speech and publishing. With growing restrictions on information, activist publishing emerged. These highly politicised publishers had a social responsibility, to contribute to social change. In spite of their cultural, political and social importance, no academic study of their history has yet been undertaken. This Element aims to fill that gap by examining the history of the most vocal and arguably the most radical of this group, Ravan Press. Using archival material, interviews and the books themselves, this Element examines what the history of Ravan reveals about the role of oppositional print culture.

Cultural Writing. Gay and Lesbian Studies. "I REMEMBER is both uproariously funny and deeply moving. It is also one of the few totally original books I have ever read" -- Paul Auster. "Joe Brainard's memories of growing up in the '40s and '50s have universal appeal. He catalogues his past in terms of fashions and fads, public events and private fantasies, with such honesty and accuracy and in such abundance that, sooner or later, his history coincides with ours and we are hooked" -- The Village Voice.

An analysis of the psychological effect of word arrangement in various well-known poems.

Reasoning with autobiography is a way to self-knowledge. We can learn about ourselves, as human beings and as individuals, by reading, thinking through, and arguing about this distinctive kind of text. Reasoning with Edmund Gosse's Father and Son is a way of learning about the nature of the good life and the roles that pleasure and self-expression can play in it. Reasoning with Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs is a way of learning about transformative experience, self-alienation, and therefore the nature of the self. Good Lives: Autobiography, Self-Knowledge, Narrative, and Self-Realization develops this claim by answering a series of questions: What is an autobiography? How can we learn about ourselves from reading one? On what subjects does autobiography teach? What should we learn about them? In particular, given that autobiographies are narratives, should we learn something about the importance of narrative in human life? Could our storytelling about our own lives make sense of them as wholes, unify them over time, or make them good for us? Could storytelling make the self? Samuel Clark provides an authoritative critique of narrative and a defence of a self-realization account of the self and its good. He investigates the wide range of extant accounts of the self and of the good life, and defends pluralist realism about self-knowledge by reading and reasoning with autobiographies of self-discovery, martial life, and solitude. The volume concludes by showing that autobiography can be reasoning in pursuit of self-knowledge; each of us is an unchosen, initially opaque, seedlike self; our good is the development and expression of our latent capacities, which is our individual self-realization; and self-narration plays much less role in our lives than some thinkers have supposed, and the development and expression of potential much more.

Analyses mid-twentieth century British spy thrillers as resistance to political oppression Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War British writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, John le Carre, Pamela Frankau and filmmaker Leslie Howard combine propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Their spy fictions deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. With politically charged suspense and compelling plots and characters, these writers challenge distinctions between villain and victim and exile and belonging by dramatising relationships between stateless refugees, British agents, and most dramatically, between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crisis. Key Features The first narrative analysis of mid-twentieth century British spy thrillers demonstrating their critiques of political responses to the dangers of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism Combines research in history and political theory with literary and film analysis Adds interpretive complexity to understanding the political content of modern cultural production Original close readings of the fiction of Eric Ambler, John Le Carre and British women spy thriller writers of World War II and the Cold War, including Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, and Pamela Frankau as well as the wartime radio broadcasts and films of Leslie Howard

This book investigates the ways in which soft power is used by African countries to help drive global influence.

Selecting four of the countries most associated with soft power across the continent, this book delves into the currencies of soft power across the region: from South Africa’s progressive constitution and expanding multinational corporations, to Nigeria’s Nollywood film industry and Technical Aid Corps (TAC) scheme, Kenya’s sport diplomacy, fashion and tourism industries, and finally Egypt’s Pan-Arabism and its reputation as the cradle of civilisation. The book asks how soft power is wielded by these countries and what constraints and contradictions they encounter. Understandings of soft power have typically been driven by Western scholars, but throughout this book, Oluwaseun Tella aims to Africanise our understanding of soft power, drawing on prominent African philosophies, including Nigeria’s Omolúwàbí, South Africa’s Ubuntu, Kenya’s Harambee, and Egypt’s Pharaonism.

This book will be of interest to researchers from across political science, international relations, cultural studies, foreign policy and African Studies.

This book focuses on how to address persistent linguistically structured inequalities in education, primarily in relation to South African schools, but also in conversation with Australian work and with resonances for other multilingual contexts around the world. The book as a whole lays bare the tension between the commitment to multilingualism enshrined in the South African Constitution and language-in-education policy, and the realities of the dominance of English and the virtual absence of indigenous African languages in current educational practices. It suggests that dynamic plurilingual pedagogies can be allied with the explicit scaffolding of genre-based pedagogies to help redress asymmetries in epistemic access and to re-imagine policies, pedagogies, and practices more in tune with the realities of multilingual classrooms. The contributions to this book offer complementary insights on routes to improving access to school knowledge, especially for learners whose home language or language variety is different to that of teaching and learning at school. All subscribe to similar ideologies which include the view that multilingualism should be seen as a resource rather than a 'problem' in education. Commentaries on these chapters highlight evidence-based high-impact educational responses, and suggest that translanguaging and genre may well offer opportunities for students to expand their linguistic repertoires and to bridge epistemological differences between community and school. This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Education.

Essays tackling the difficult but essential question of how medievalism studies should look at the issue of what is and what is not "authentic". Given the impossibility of completely recovering the past, the issue of authenticity is clearly central to scholarship on postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages. The essays in the first part of this volume address authenticitydirectly, discussing the 2017 Middle Ages in the Modern World conference; Early Gothic themes in nineteenth-century British literature; medievalism in the rituals of St Agnes; emotions in Game of Thrones; racism in Disney's Middle Ages; and religious medievalism. The essayists' conclusions regarding authenticity then inform, even as they are tested by, the subsequent papers, which consider such matters as medievalism in contemporary French populism; nationalism in re-enactments of medieval battles; postmedieval versions of the Kingis Quair; Van Gogh's invocations of Dante; Surrealist medievalism; chant in video games; music in cinematic representations of the Black Death; and sound in Aleksei German's film Hard to Be a God. Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: Aida Audeh, Tessel Bauduin, Matthias Berger, Karen Cook, Timothy Curran, Nickolas Haydock, Alexander Kolassa, Carolyne Larrington, David Matthews, E.J. Pavlinich, Lotte Reinbold, Clare Simmons, Adam Whittaker, Daniel Wollenberg.

Augustine's Confessions and Shakespeare's King Lear are two of the most influential and enduring works of the Western canon or world literature. But what does Stratford-upon-Avon have to do with Hippo, or the ascetical heretic-fighting polemicist with the author of some of the world's most beautiful love poetry? To answer these questions, Kim Paffenroth analyses the similarities and differences between the thinking of these two figures on the themes of love, language, nature and reason. Pairing and connecting the insights of Shakespeare's most nihilist tragedy with those of Augustine's most personal and sometimes self-condemnatory, sometimes triumphal work, challenges us to see their worldviews as more similar than they first seem, and as more relevant to our own fragmented and disillusioned world.

"Inseparable" collects poems written between 1995 and 2005 by the New York poet, editor and novelist Lewis Warsh. Strongly identified with New York since the 1960s, when he co-founded "Angel Hair" magazine with Anne Waldman, Warsh makes poems from the city's linguistic fabric, interwoven with a bemused real-time interiority. The 35 poems of this collection are pitted with reminiscences made approachable to the reader by their lack of self-absorption; it is the momentum of the will to persist by means of language--"moving, word by word"--against the incipient flickerings of mortality, that is their real logic. This act of self-propulsion may be subject to doubt ("Can we spend our lives feeding/off simple endurance?"), but it is humbly pursued: Warsh resists the inflated rhetoric such preoccupations usually attract and sticks instead with (in the words of his colleague Clark Coolidge) "confusion, in strict order."

Catafalque offers a revolutionary new reading of the great psychologist Carl Jung as mystic, gnostic and prophet for our time.

This book is the first major re-imagining of both Jung and his work since the publication of the Red Book in 2009 -- and is the only serious assessment of them written by a classical scholar who understands the ancient Gnostic, Hermetic and alchemical foundations of his thought as well as Jung himself did. At the same time it skillfully tells the forgotten story of Jung's relationship with the great Sufi scholar, Henry Corbin, and with Persian Sufi tradition.

The strange reality of the Red Book, or "New Book" as Carl Jung called it, lies close to the heart of Catafalque. In meticulous detail Peter Kingsley uncovers its great secret, hidden in plain sight and still -- as if by magic -- unrecognized by all those who have been unable to understand this mysterious, incantatory text.

But the hard truth of who Jung was and what he did is only a small part of what this book uncovers. It also exposes the full extent of that great river of esoteric tradition that stretches all the way back to the beginnings of our civilization. It unveils the surprising realities behind western philosophy, literature, poetry, prophecy -- both ancient and modern.

In short, Peter Kingsley shows us not only who Carl Jung was but who we in the West are as well. Much more than a brilliant spiritual biography, Catafalque holds the key to understanding why our western culture is dying. And, an incantatory text in its own right, it shows the way to discovering what we in these times of great crisis must do.

This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed, with Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), then detective fiction's very first culprit is an animal. Animals, moreover, consistently appear as victims, clues, and companions, while the abstract conception of animality is closely tied to the idea of criminality. Although it is often described as an essentially conservative form, detective fiction can unsettle the binary of human and animal to intersect with developing concerns in animal studies: animal agency, the ethical complexities of human/animal interaction, the politics and literary aesthetics of violence, and animal metaphor. Gathering its 14 essays into sections on ontologies, ethics, politics, and forms, Animals in Detective Fiction provides a compelling and nuanced analysis of the central role creatures play in this enduringly popular and continually morphing literary form.

This collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars with the aim to shed new light on various interconnected aspects of the Gothic through the lens of converging critical and methodological approaches. With its wide-ranging interdisciplinary perspective, the book explores the domains of literary, pictorial, filmic, televisual and popular cultural texts in English from the eighteenth century to the present day. Within these pages, the Gothic is discussed as a dynamic form that exceeds the concept of literary genre, proving able to renovate and adapt through constant processes of hybridisation. Investigating the hypothesis that the Gothic returns in times of cultural crisis, this study maps out transgressive and experimental modes conducive to alternative experiences of the intricacies of the human (and post-human) condition.

Essays collected in this book discuss textual and discursive formulations of dominance and resistance. The authors analyze how they are narrated and re-narrated, framed and reframed in different social, political and language communities and realities, through different media and means, and translated into different contexts and languages. As the ways we name, rename, or label events, people and places have implications in the real world, the essays are also meant to investigate the ways in which we partake in negotiating its construction, its changing meanings and senses through the stories we tell and the practices we live by.

The book presents a theory of relationships between the forms of devotion and early drama genres. The historical background is the circumstances of the Church becoming independent of the Empire. A theological and philosophical aspect of the transformation of piety at the time was the specification of the ontological status of the sacred (spiritualization) and "shifting it to Heaven" (transcendentalization). In opposition to a theory of Western civilization as a process of increasing individual self-control, the author argues for the need to take into account purely religious conditions (the idea of recapitulation). This allows the author to develop a holistic aesthetics for the religiously inspired creativity in the period spanning the 11th-15th centuries and to propose a new typology of medieval drama.

This monograph is a study of the work of British author A. S. Byatt, exploring the cultural representation of the woman intellectual in her fiction. It argues that Byatt's representations of this figure show narratives of intellectual women to be inherently mythopoeic, or capable of restructuring the myth of the intellectual as male by default. This mythopoeia is, furthermore, intrinsically feminist in function, thus potentially broadening the conventional, limited view of women in intellectual history. The book will be the first study of Byatt's work to examine this figure in detail, and the first study of women intellectuals in historical and literary discourse to apply concepts of mythopoeia and sexual difference in ways that allow new readings of women's status and work in public spheres.