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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > General
"But when I close my eyes, I first fall as if drowning into the
silty waters of the Chari River, which traces the border between
Chad and Cameroon, and into which so many men, women and even
children were thrown, sometimes still alive, their hands knotted
behind their backs, or tied up in a shoulder bag. I sink with them
towards the sand and the clay, down amidst the green and the brown,
passing purple weeds, shards of pottery, and crocodile scales. My
head is heavier than a cannonball and carries me toward the abyss:
I dive into a bottomless bag where the letters collide or slip
away, call out to or ignore each other, I bathe in an unlimited
space free from the constraints of cycles and dates, and I enter
into the time of childhood, which indeed has no concept of time.
[...] all my memories take flight in the wind of the sands, the
past flows in the river, plays out in the branches, explodes in the
foliage. The past is all around me now - and I laugh when I say
'the past,' because none of all this is past." Michael Ferrier In
1979, two young boys play Scrabble in a hot, dusty district of
N'Djamena, Chad, while around them war rages, apparently destroying
all in its path: people, places, and memories. And yet, just as the
boys take their letters from the depths of the pouch, so Michael
Ferrier draws from the darkness words and images that he
reassembles into a beautiful and moving tribute to the city, its
people, and the childhood that seemed to end there in those days of
chaos and destruction but which he brings miraculously back to life
in a defiant, poetic statement on the power of friendship, family,
and memory.
Although portrayed as the 'boozing buffoon' of Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine, Hogg (both as the celebrated Ettrick Shepherd
and anonymously) was a key contributor of songs, narrative poems,
tales, and reviews to the liveliest of all early nineteenth-century
periodicals. The present volume includes several items hitherto
published only in Blackwood's, and ranges from the infamous
'Chaldee Manuscript' to newly-identified items such as a Scottish
commemoration of the coronation of George IV. The volume also
includes works Hogg intended for Blackwood's but which are now
published for the first time. Hogg's work for his favourite
periodical is provided in this volume in full cultural context,
including detailed annotation and a convenient and complete
editorial apparatus. Also included is music for several of the
Shepherd's songs.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”
With those famous words unfolds a tale that renews the joy and caring that are Christmas. Whether we read it aloud with our family and friends or open the pages on a chill winter evening to savor the story in solitude, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a very special holiday experience.
It is the one book that every year will warm our hearts with favorite memories of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future — and will remind us with laughter and tears that the true Christmas spirit comes from giving with love.
With a heartwarming account of Dickens’s first reading of the Carol, and a biographical sketch.
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. -- .
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.
Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a classic of
existential literature. It concludes the first and richest phase of
Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship and is the text that
philosophers look to first when attempting to define Kierkegaard's
own philosophy. Familiar Kierkegaardian themes are introduced in
the work, including truth as subjectivity, indirect communication,
the leap, and the impossibility of forming a philosophical system
for human existence. The Postscript sums up the aims of the
preceding pseudonymous works and opens the way to the next part of
Kierkegaard's increasingly tempestuous life: it can thus be seen as
a cornerstone of his philosophical thought. This volume offers the
work in a new and accessible translation by Alastair Hannay,
together with an introduction that sets the work in its
philosophical and historical contexts.
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.
This single volume brings together all of Poe's stories and poems, and illuminates the diverse and multifaceted genius of one of the greatest and most influential figures in American literary history.
Published in English for the first time, Refugee Conversations is a
delightful work that reveals Brecht as a master of comic satire.
Written swiftly in the opening years of the Second World War, the
dialogues have an urgent contemporary relevance to a Europe once
again witnessing populations on the move. The premise is simple:
two refugees from Nazi Germany meet in a railway cafe and discuss
the current state of the world. They are a bourgeois Jewish
physicist and a left-leaning worker. Their world views, their
voices and their social experience clash horribly, but they find
they have unexpected common ground - especially in their more
recent experience of the surreal twists and turns of life in exile,
the bureaucracy, and the pathetic failings of the societies that
are their unwilling hosts. Their conversations are light and swift
moving, the subjects under discussion extremely various: beer,
cigars, the Germans' love of order, their education and experience
of life, art, pornography, politics, 'great men', morality,
seriousness, Switzerland, America ... despite the circumstances of
both characters there is a wonderfully whimsical serendipity about
their dialogue, the logic and the connections often delightfully
absurd. This edition features a full introduction and notes by
Professor Tom Kuhn (St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, UK).
A Hardcover Classics edition of Thomas Hardy s impassioned novel of
courtship in rural life, soon to be a movie starring Carey Mulligan
and Michael Sheen In Thomas Hardy s first major literary success,
independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury
to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the
area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the
gentleman-farmer Boldwood, the soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy, and
the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways,
unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy
ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. One of
his first works set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex, Hardy s
novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his
evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with
unflinching honesty about sexual relationships. This edition, based
on Hardy s original 1874 manuscript, is the complete novel he never
saw published, and restores its full candor and innovation.
Rosemarie Morgan s introduction discusses the history of its
publication, as well as the biblical and classical allusions that
permeate the novel."
A generation ago the Achaemenid Empire was a minor sideshow within
long-established disciplines. For Greek historians, the Persians
were the defeated national enemy, a catalyst of change in the
aftermath of the fall of Athens or the victim of Alexander. For
Egyptologists and Assyriologists, they belonged to an era that
received scant attention compared with the glory days of the New
Kingdom or the Neo-Assyrian Empire. For most archaeologists, they
were elusive in a material record that lacked a distinctively
Achaemenid imprint. Things have changed now. The empire is an
object of study in its own right, and a community of Achaemenid
specialists has emerged to carry that study forward. Such
communities are, however, apt to talk among themselves and the
present volume aims to give a professional but non-specialist
audience some taste of the variety of subject-matter and discourse
that typifies Achaemenid studies. The broad theme of political and
cultural interaction reflecting the empires diversity and the
nature of our sources for its history is illustrated in fourteen
chapters that move from issues in Greek historiography through a
series of regional studies (Egypt, Anatolia, Babylonia and Persia)
to Zarathushtra, Alexander the Great and the early modern reception
of Persepolis.
This book reconstructs the lines of nihilism that Walter Benjamin
took from Friedrich Nietzsche that define both his theory of art
and the avant-garde, and his approach to political action. It
retraces the eccentric route of Benjamin's philosophical discourse
in the representation of the modern as a place of "permanent
catastrophe", where he attempts to overcome the Nietzschean
nihilism through messianic hope. Using conventions from literary
criticism this book explores the many sources of Benjamin's
thought, demonstrating that behind the materialism which Benjamin
incorporates into his Theses on the Concept of History is hidden
Nietzsche's nihilism. Mauro Ponzi analyses how Benjamin's Arcades
Project uses figures such as Baudelaire, Marx, Aragon, Proust and
Blanqui as allegories to explain many aspects of modernity. The
author argues that Benjamin uses Baudelaire as a paradigm to
emphasize the dark side of the modern era, offering us a key to the
interpretation of communicative and cultural trends of today.
The story of Jewish literature is a kaleidoscopic one, multilingual
and transnational in character, spanning the globe as well as the
centuries. In this broad, thought-provoking introduction to Jewish
literature from 1492 to the present, cultural historian Ilan
Stavans focuses on its multilingual and transnational nature.
Stavans presents a wide range of traditions within Jewish
literature and the variety of writers who made those traditions
possible. Represented are writers as dissimilar as Luis de Carvajal
the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Babel, Anzia
Yezierska, Elias Canetti, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Irving Howe,
Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Amos Oz,
Moacyr Scliar, and David Grossman. The story of Jewish literature
spans the globe as well as the centuries, from the marrano poets
and memorialists of medieval Spain, to the sprawling Yiddish
writing in Ashkenaz (the "Pale of Settlement' in Eastern Europe),
to the probing narratives of Jewish immigrants to the United States
and other parts of the New World. It also examines the accounts of
horror during the Holocaust, the work of Israeli authors since the
creation of the Jewish State in 1948, and the "ingathering" of
Jewish works in Brazil, Bulgaria, Argentina, and South Africa at
the end of the twentieth century. This kaleidoscopic introduction
to Jewish literature presents its subject matter as constantly
changing and adapting.
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.
There was a time when good writing would be defined simply by
adverting to a few literary classics. That kind of strategy is less
helpful these days, when so many different styles and voices clamor
for attention. What Is Good Writing? sets the terms for a
contemporary debate on writing achievement by drawing on empirical
research in linguistics and the other cognitive sciences that shed
light on the development of fluency in language generally. The
utility of defining good writing as fluent writing in this sense -
on a par with the typical fluency in speech attained by normal
adults - is demonstrated by the progress it permits in evaluating
the success of current writing programs in school and university,
which for the most part have proved unable to deliver writing
assessments that are both valid and reliable. What Is Good Writing?
indicates an alternative approach that rests on a more scientific
footing and shows why reading is key and why standard composition
programs are so often seen to fail.
"Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople." So opens
this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by
death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead
or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small
Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the
conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ear tuned to
the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve
pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here,
Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the
condolences and shapes the questions posed by this familiar
mystery. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children
who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave markers,
gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are the
lessons for life our mortality teaches us.
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.
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.
Epistemic Freedom in Africa is about the struggle for African
people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where
they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. The imperial denial
of common humanity to some human beings meant that in turn their
knowledges and experiences lost their value, their epistemic
virtue. Now, in the twenty-first century, descendants of enslaved,
displaced, colonized, and racialized peoples have entered academies
across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings,
their lives matter and they were born into valid and legitimate
knowledge systems that are capable of helping humanity to transcend
the current epistemic and systemic crises. Together, they are
engaging in diverse struggles for cognitive justice, fighting
against the epistemic line which haunts the twenty-first century.
The renowned historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo J.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni offers a penetrating and well-argued case for
centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and
epistemic site from which to interpret the world, whilst
simultaneously making an equally strong argument for globalizing
knowledge from Africa so as to attain ecologies of knowledges. This
is a dual process of both deprovincializing Africa, and in turn
provincializing Europe. The book highlights how the mental universe
of Africa was invaded and colonized, the long-standing struggles
for 'an African university', and the trajectories of contemporary
decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall in
South Africa. This landmark work underscores the fact that only
once the problem of epistemic freedom has been addressed can Africa
achieve political, cultural, economic and other freedoms. This
groundbreaking new book is accessible to students and scholars
across Education, History, Philosophy, Ethics, African Studies,
Development Studies, Politics, International Relations, Sociology,
Postcolonial Studies and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies.
The Open Access versions Chapter 1 and Chapter 9, available at
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429492204 have been made available
under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives
4.0 license.
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Labyrinths
(Paperback)
Jorge Luis Borges; Edited by Donald A. Yates, James E. Irby; Introduction by William Gibson; Contributions by Andre Maurois
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R404
R378
Discovery Miles 3 780
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The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge
Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the
structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well
over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and
allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's
international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level,
an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which
American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New
Directions publication of Labyrinths. This new edition of
Labyrinths, the classic representative selection of Borges' writing
edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (in translations by
themselves and others), includes the text of the original edition
(as augmented in 1964) as well as Irby's biographical and critical
essay, a poignant tribute by Andre Maurois, and a chronology of the
author's life. Borges enthusiast William Gibson has contributed a
new introduction bringing Borges' influence and importance into the
twenty-first century."
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