Violence in/and the Great Lakes: The Thought of V.Y. Mudimbe and Beyond is, in the best sense of the term, a homage to Valentin Mudimbe. This collection of essays honours the intellectual legacy of Mudimbe, for decades now one of Africa and the diaspora's most significant minds, by taking up the challenges - ethical, political, philosophical, literary, sociological, anthropological, psychological - his work poses. This book gathers a group of US- and Africa-based scholars, many of whom are long-time Mudimbe collaborators and colleagues, who use the questions posed, the critiques and insights offered and the paradigms constructed by Mudimbe's oeuvre to understand the implication - and, in some instances, the application - of Mudimbe's work in our moment. In this way, the project is true to Mudimbe's deepest commitment because the collection, for all the range of its contributions, for all the variegated and often dissonant - yet resonant - ways in which the authors take up Mudimbe's thinking, never strays too far from the historic question of violence and the effects of that violence in the Great Lakes region of Africa; and, indeed, of violence in Africa itself. This is, in every important way, the founding inquiry of Mudimbe's work, and it is sustained in this collection; and, as importantly, it is given new life, new philosophical shape, new political impetus, because it is a question that continues to haunt Mudimbe's writing and, of course, the continent itself. In so honouring Mudimbe, this book is grounded in a key contribution by Mudimbe himself. Mudimbe is thus, as has long been his wont, reflecting upon his work in the company of those scholars whose work he has influenced and whom, it is clear, have been important interlocutors for Mudimbe. Contributors: Justin K. Bisanswa, Ngwarsungu Chiwengo, Grant Farred, Olga Hel-Bongo, Kasereka Kavwahirehi, Laura Kerr, V-Y Mudimbe, Leonhard Praeg and Zubairu Wai.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and whether and how the humanities can increase human happiness. The contributors to this volume of essays investigate the question: what do literary scholars contribute to social scientific research on human happiness and flourishing? Of all humanities disciplines, none is more resistant to the program of positive psychology or the prevailing discourse of human flourishing than literary studies. The approach taken in this volume of essays is neither to gloss over that antagonism nor to launch a series of blasts against positive psychology and the happiness industry. Rather, the contributors reflect on how their literary research-work to which they are personally committed-might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing. The contributors' areas of research are wide ranging, covering literary aesthetics, book history, digital humanities, and reader reception, as well as the important "inter-disciplines" of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and black studies-fields in which issues of stigma and exclusion are paramount, and which have critiqued the discourse of human flourishing for its failure to grapple with structural inequality and human difference. Literary scholars are drawn more readily to the problematic than to the decidable, but by dwelling on the trouble spots in a field of inquiry still largely confined to the sciences, Literary Studies and Human Flourishing provides the groundwork for new and more productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange.

Stephen Hudson is the pen name of Sydney Schiff (1868-1944), an English novelist who received acclaim in the 1920s and 1930s from such writers as Thomas Mann and Somerset Maugham. Since that time, however, literary tastes have changed, and interest in Hudson's work has diminished. That Hudson's novels do not deserve such obscurity is the belief of Theophilus E. M. Boll, who here introduces one of the best of them, Richard, Myrtle and I, to present-day readers. Boll's biographical and critical sections contain, respectively, the first authentic account of Hudson's life, and the first comprehensive study of the development and the meaning of his art as novelist and short-story writer. The two -part introduction adds a wholly new section to the history of the English novel in the twentieth century and to the history of literary relationships between the Continent and England. In telling the story of a marriage of minds and the literary consequences it produced, Boll places the form and content of Hudson's art against the background of his particular experiences. The novel Richard, Myrtle and I, which forms the second half of this volume, is clearly representative of Stephen Hudson's best work. It is largely autobiographical in its main theme: the evolution of Stephen Hudson as novelist. Newly edited by Violet Schiff, the Myrtle in the story, it is a blend of realism and allegory that tells how a strong creative impulse and encouragement from a sympathetic wife make it possible for a sensitive and perceptive man to become a creative artist. Appraising his own work, Stephen Hudson once remarked, "I have never had any desire to write for the sake of writing and I am devoid of ambition. I have accumulated a quantity of vital experience which remains in a state of flux. Continuously passing in and out of my consciousness it demands to be sorted out and synthesized. When the chaos becomes unbearable I start writing and go on until the congestion is relieved." Referring to this passage, Boll comments, "We ought not to misunderstand that modesty of his. It was based on a pride that aimed at perfection because nothing lower was worth aiming at. After the labor of creating was over, Hudson measured what he had done against what he judged to be supremely great; any lower standard meant a concession his pride would not make." It is in Richard, Myrtle and I that Stephen Hudson came closest, perhaps, to his unattainable goal.

The essays collected within this volume ask how literary practices are shaped by the experience of being at sea-and also how they forge that experience. Individual chapters explore the literary worlds of naval ships, whalers, commercial vessels, emigrant ships, and troop transports from the seventeenth to the twentieth-first century, revealing a rich history of shipboard reading, writing, and performing. Contributors are interested both in how literary activities adapt to the maritime world, and in how individual and collective shipboard experiences are structured through-and framed by-such activities. In this respect, the volume builds on scholarship that has explored reading as a spatially situated and embodied practice. As our contributors demonstrate, the shipboard environment and the ocean beyond it place the mind and body under peculiar forms of pressure, and these determine acts of reading-and of writing and performing-in specific ways.

Nineteenth-century readers had an appetite for books so big they seemed to contain the whole world: immense novels, series of novels, encyclopaedias. Especially in Eurasia and North America, especially among the middle and upper classes, people had the space, time, and energy for very long books. More than other multi-volume nineteenth-century collections, the dictionaries, or their descendants of the same name, remain with us in the twenty-first century. Online or on paper, people still consult Oxford for British English, Webster for American, Grimm for German, Littre for French, Dahl for Russian. Even in spaces whose literary languages already had long philological and lexicographic traditions-Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin-the burgeoning imperialisms and nationalisms of the nineteenth century generated new dictionaries. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Newly automated technologies and systems of communication expanded the international reach of dictionaries, while rising literacy rates, book consumption, and advertising led to their unprecedented popularization. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. In this volume, eighteen of the world's leading scholars investigate these lexicographers asking how the world within which they lived supported their projects? What did language itself mean for them? What goals did they try to accomplish in their dictionaries?

This collection opens the geospatiality of "Asia" into an environmental framework called "Oceania" and pushes this complex regional multiplicity towards modes of trans-local solidarity, planetary consciousness, multi-sited decentering, and world belonging. At the transdisciplinary core of this "worlding" process lies the multiple spatial and temporal dynamics of an environmental eco-poetics, articulated via thinking and creating both with and beyond the Pacific and Asia imaginary.

The 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. The 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. It is the aim of the James Baldwin Review to provide a vibrant and multidisciplinary forum for the international community of Baldwin scholars, students, and enthusiasts. -- .

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in black South African literary history connects the black literary archive in South Africa - from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century - to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist, Fernando Ortiz. Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary history - literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation - that is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as contemporary subjects, to negotiate, counteract, reinvent and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid and in the context of democracy.

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.

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.

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.