This book reflects the three major emphases of Nicholas Boyle's intellectual life - literature, philosophical theology, and social and cultural criticism - and the distinctive emphasis of his approach to all three.

Life Writings/Narratives and studies in gender have been posing critical challenges to fetishizing the manner of canon formations and curriculum propriety. This book engages with these and other challenges turning our customary gaze towards women especially marginal, enabling us to interrogate the established pedagogical practices that accentuates the continuing denial of their agency. Reproduction of the cultural modes of narrativization based on memory and experience becomes a mode of reclaiming the agency. These challenge the homogenising singularity of communitarian notions besides dominant gender constructs using visual, textual, popular, historical, cultural and gender modes enabling one to rethink our received theoretical frameworks. This edited volume brings together 21 essays on life writings produced by both well-established and emerging writers in the field of literature written by scholars from countries like India, Pakistan, China, USA, Iran, Yemen and Australia, to name just a few. Many of the essays in this book focus on how the progress of the self is often impeded by the society it finds itself in. With an enlightening foreword by Dr. E.V. Ramakrishnan and a detailed, critical introduction by Aparna Lanjewar Bose, this anthology is useful for all those who wish to learn more about this genre of writing.

This book addresses how our revisionary practices account for relations between texts and how they are read. It offers an overarching philosophy of revision concerning works of fiction, fact, and faith, revealing unexpected insights about the philosophy of language, the metaphysics of fact and fiction, and the history and philosophy of science and religion. Using the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien as exemplars, the authors introduce a fundamental distinction between the purely physical and the linguistic aspects of texts. They then demonstrate how two competing theories of reference-descriptivism and referentialism-are instead constitutive of a single semantic account needed to explain all kinds of revision. The authors also propose their own metaphysical foundations of fiction and fact. The next part of the book brings the authors' philosophy of revision into dialogue with Thomas Kuhn's famous analysis of factual, and specifically scientific, change. It also discusses a complex episode in the history of paleontology, demonstrating how scientific and popular texts can diverge over time. Finally, the authors expand their philosophy of revision to religious texts, arguing that, rather than being distinct, such texts are always read as other kinds, that faith tends to be more important as evidence for religious texts than for others, and that the latter explains why religious communities tend to have remarkable historical longevity. Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith offers a unique and comprehensive account of the philosophy of revision. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of literature, literary theory and criticism, and history and philosophy of science and religion.

This book investigates the role of the idea of the literary canon in the teaching of literature, especially in colleges and secondary schools in the United States. Before the term "canon" was widely used in literary studies, which occurred in the second half of 20th century when the canon was first seriously viewed as politically and culturally problematic, the idea that some literary texts were more worthy of being studied than others existed since the beginning of the discipline of the teaching of literature in the 1800s. The concept of the canon, however, extends as far back as to Ancient Greece and its meaning has evolved over time. Thus, this book charts the changing meaning of the idea of the literary canon, examining its influence specifically in the teaching of literature from the beginning of the field to the 21st century. To explain how the literary canon and the teaching of literature have changed over time and continue to change, this book constructs a theory of canon formation based on the ideas of Michel Foucault and the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda, illustrating that the literary canon, while frequently contested, is integral to the teaching of literature yet changes as the teaching of literature changes.

This title presents a comprehensive guide to the top book bloggers on the Internet, and asks: who are these people, what are they writing about and why?

For a genre that imagines possible futures as a means of critiquing the present, utopian/dystopian fiction has been surprisingly obsessed with how the past is remembered. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future examines modern and contemporary utopian/dystopian literature's preoccupation with memory, asserting that from the nineteenth century onward, memory and forgetting feature as key problematics in the genre as well as sources of the utopian impulse. Through a series of close readings of utopian/dystopian novels informed by theory and dialectics, Hanson provides a case study history of how and why memory emerged as a problem for utopia, and how recent dystopian texts situate memory as a crucial mode of utopian agency. Hanson demonstrates that many modern and contemporary writers of the genre consider the presence of certain forms of memory as necessary to the project of imagining better societies or to avoiding possible dystopian outcomes.

How can thinkers grapple with the question of the human when they have been dehumanized? How can black thinkers confront and make sense of a world structured by antiblackness, a world that militates against the very existence of blacks? These are the questions that guide Tendayi Sithole's brilliant analyses of the work of Sylvia Wynter, Aime Cesaire, Steve Biko, Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Mabogo P. More, and a critique of Giorgio Agamben. Through his careful interrogation of their writings Sithole shows how the black register represents a uniquely critical perspective from which to confront worlds that are systematically structured to dehumanize. The black register is the ways of thinking, knowing and doing that emerge from existential struggles against antiblackness and that dwell in the lived experience of being black in an antiblack world. The black register is the force of critique that comes from thinkers who are dehumanized, and who in turn question, define, and analyze the reality that they are in, in order to reframe it and unmask the forces that inform subjection. This book redefines the arc of critical black thought over the last seventy-five years and it will be an indispensable text for anyone concerned with the deep and enduring ways in which race structures our world and our thought.

Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty

This book retraces Mallarme's trajectory as a poet, showing how he positioned his work in relation to Hegel's Aesthetics. Norman argues that Mallarme situated his work at the conclusion of the history of art, which made Mallarme's work so interesting for Blanchot and Derrida.

Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression

An analysis of the political and ecological consequences of charting the Amazon River basin in narrative fiction, Mapping the Amazon examines how widely read novels from twentieth-century South America attempted to map the region for readers. Authors such as Jose Eustasio Rivera, Romulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cesar Calvo, Marcio Souza, and Mario de Andrade travelled to the Amazonian regions of their respective countries and encountered firsthand a forest divided and despoiled by the spatial logic of extractivism. Writing against that logic, they fill their novels with geographic, human, and ecological realities omitted from official accounts of the region. Though the plots unfold after the height of the Amazon rubber boom (1850-1920), the authors construct landscapes marked by that first large-scale exploitation of Amazonian biodiversity. The material practices of rubber extraction resurface in the stories told about the removal of other plants, seeds, and minerals from the forest as well as its conversion into farmland. Smith places the counter-discursive impulses of each novel in dialogue with various modernizing projects that carve Amazonia into cultural and economic spaces: border commissions, extractive infrastructure, school geography manuals, Indigenous education programs, and touristic propaganda. Even the "novel maps" studied, however, have blind spots, and Mapping the Amazon considers the legacy of such unintentional omissions today.

Literature in English: How and Why is an accessible guide for students. It deals with the fundamental concepts of literary form and genre; the history of English-language literature from the medieval period to the present; relations between the study of literature and other disciplines; literary theory; researching a topic; and writing a paper. This new edition contains a brand new chapter which takes literary theory to another level, using it to link literature to the issues that concern us most, whether in our own lives or in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. The book has also been fully updated throughout, with significant additions to the introduction and further reading sections. Overall, Literature in English: * Grounds the study of literature throughout by referencing a selection of well-known novels, plays and poems * Examines the central questions that readers ask when confronting literary texts, and shows how these make literary theory meaningful and necessary * Links British, American and postcolonial literature into a coherent whole * Discusses film as literature and provides the basic conceptual tools needed to study film within a literature-course framework * Places particular emphasis on interdisciplinarity by examining the connections between the study of literature and other disciplines * Links literary theory to current global challenges, placing special emphasis on new and evolving approaches such as ecocriticism, new materialism and the spatial turn * Provides extensive guidance on further reading. Written in a clear and engaging style, this is an essential guide for literature students around the world.

Charles Ferrall argues that the politics of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis was a response to the separation of art from an increasingly industrialized society. Fascism became attractive to these writers because it promised to reintegrate art into society while simultaneously guaranteeing its autonomy. Yet with the exception of Pound and Yeats, these writers all finally rejected fascism, preferring instead to see the aesthetic as a sphere in permanent opposition to liberal democracy, rather than the basis for a new social order.

What does Afro-Europe signify? This volume explores the concept and possibility of a black European community by analysing the ways in which contemporary Francophone African writers articulate and interrogate their complex relationships with European society, culture and history. Through the different contributions in this volume, readers will discover the symbiotic ways in which Africa has transformed/been transformed (in/by) Europe and in turn how Africanness has (re)defined Europeanness. To this end, the volume places scholarly articles addressing the relationship between the francophone and Afro-European context alongside new, specially commissioned short stories and essays by some of the most critically-acclaimed and influential producers of Afropean writing today: Fatou Diome, Alain Mabanckou, Leonora Miano, Wilfried N'Sonde, Sami Tchak and Abdourahman Waberi. Works by these authors are discussed in and across the scholarly interventions, generating dialogue around what it means to be 'Francophone' and 'Afropean' in the twenty-first century. At a time when it is no longer easy to define what Europe really is, this book considers to what extent the category 'Afropean' may prove helpful in improving our understanding of the complex ways in which minority communities conceive of identity in Europe today and address the range of issues impacting them. The notion of 'Afropeanism' is of course relatively new, and this book does not claim to offer an exhaustive analysis of the term's usage and/or potential pertinence. Rather, the cultural, political, and social circumstances of Europe today are reflected in discussions surrounding the term and perhaps not surprisingly, in the diverse and diverging perspectives adopted by the scholars and creative writers in this volume.

John Cox tells the intriguing story of stage devils from their earliest appearance in English plays to the closing of the theaters by parliamentary order in 1642. The book spans both medieval and Renaissance drama and includes the medieval Mystery cycles on the one hand, through to plays by Greene, Marlowe, Shakespeare (Henry VI Parts 1 and 2), Jonson, Middleton and Davenant.

In this collection, an international team of contributors contests the conventional critical view of modernism as a transnational or supranational entity. They examine relationships between modernist poetry and place, and foreground issues of region and space, nation and location in the work of poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. The book brings the work of major canonical writers into juxtaposition with more neglected modernists such as Basil Bunting and Dylan Thomas, writers whose investment in the concepts of region and nation, it is argued, contributed to their relative marginalization.

Each age has its value system of literary criticism whose construction is inseparable from the mainstream ideology of the society. In contemporary China, the mainstream ideology is inevitably Marxism. This book is composed of two parts. The first part studies literary criticism in contemporary China whose development is closely related to the popularization of Marxism and the unavoidable collisions between Marxism and other theories. It also introduces some relevant critical debates, such as the debate on the criticism of Yu Pingbo, a representative and one of the authoritative scholars studying The Dream of the Red Chamber. In the second part, the author expounds the history of Chinese literature from a macro-level perspective, involving works, genres, ideologies, schools, etc. He also discusses the challenges facing Chinese literature under the background of economic globalization. Will politics, cultures, including literature and arts, be globalized? In addition, the author puts forward that a dynamic concept is needed for a better understanding of Chinese culture and gives his suggestions about the "adjustments" Chinese people should make for the present. This book will attract scholars and students of literary criticism studies and Chinese literary studies. People who are interested in Chinese literature and thought will also benefit from this book.

Marxism initiated a new era not only for people to fight for socialist future, but also for each discipline of sciences to witness profound changes. In such a context, literature, which has always been closely related to politics, will inevitably move toward a new direction. This book is composed of two parts. Part One studies the development of literary theories in contemporary China from a Marxist perspective. It introduces the basic ideas of Marxist literary theories as well as their spread and development in China, such as the combination of the theories and Chinese revolutionary literature. Moreover, it discusses the challenges facing Marxist literary theories in the 21st century under the background of diversification of literature and art, in terms of theory and practice, and high technologies which brought about electronic writing and digital communication of literary works. The second part elucidates the author's insights into major issues concerning literary theories (e.g. the relationship between literature and people, literature and reality, perception and rationality in literary creation, etc.) This book will appeal to scholars and students of literary aesthetics and Chinese literary and cultural studies. People who are interested in history of contemporary Chinese literature will also benefit from this book.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability brings together some of the most influential and important contemporary perspectives in this growing field. The book traces the history of the field and locates literary disability studies in the wider context of activism and theory. It introduces debates about definitions of disability and explores intersectional approaches in which disability is understood in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality and ethnicity. Divided broadly into sections according to literary genre, this is an important resource for those interested in exploring and deepening their knowledge of the field of literature and disability studies.

This collection serves as a showcase for literary translation research with a focus on African perspectives, highlighting theoretical and methodological developments in the discipline while shedding further light on the literary landscape in Africa. The book offers a framework for understanding key approaches and topics in literary translation situated in the African context, covering foundational concepts as well as new directions within the field. The first half of the volume focuses on the translation product, exploring such topics as translation strategies, literary genres, and self-translation, while the second half examines process and reception, allowing for an in-depth look at agency, habitus, and ethics. Each chapter is structured to allow for the introduction of a given theoretical aspect of literary translation followed by a summary of a completed research project with an African focus showing theory in practice, offering a model for readers to build their own literary translation research projects while also underscoring the range of perspectives and unique challenges to literary translation work in Africa. This unique volume is a key resource for students and scholars in translation studies, giving visibility to African perspectives on literary translation while pointing the way forward for future research directions.

this volume is the first to bring together an extensive interdisciplinary engagement with the multiple ways in which the concepts and practices of translation and religion intersect. contributions from a range of leading international specialists. an indispensable scholarly resource for researchers in translation studies and the study of religions.

Although the broad topic of time and literature in the long eighteenth century has received focused attention from successive generations of literary critics, this book adopts a radically new approach to the subject. Taking inspiration from recent revisionist accounts of the horological practices of the age, as well as current trends in ecocriticism, historical prosody, sensory history, social history, and new materialism, it offers a pioneering investigation of themes that have never previously received sustained critical scrutiny. Specifically, it explores how the essayists, poets, playwrights, and novelists of the period meditated deeply upon the physical form, social functions, and philosophical implications of particular time-telling objects. Consequently, each chapter considers a different device - mechanical watches, pendulums, sandglasses, sundials, flowers, and bells - and the literary responses of significant figures such as Alexander Pope, Anne Steele, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, and William Hazlitt are carefully examined.

Thought and Knowledge applies theory and research from the learning sciences to teach students the critical thinking skills that they need to succeed in today's world. The text identifies, defines, discusses, and deconstructs contemporary challenges to critical thinking, from fake news, alternative facts, and deep fakes, to misinformation, disinformation, post-truth, and more. It guides students through the explosion of content on the internet and social media and enables them to become careful and critical evaluators as well as consumers. The text is grounded in psychological science, especially the cognitive sciences, and brought to life through humorous and engaging language and numerous practical and real-world examples and anecdotes. This edition has been streamlined with thoughtful consideration over what content to keep, what to cut, and how much new and current research to add. Critical thinking skills are presented in every chapter, empowering students to learn more efficiently, research more productively, and present logical, critical, and informed arguments. The skills are reviewed at the end of the chapter, and a complete list of skills with definitions and examples are included in the appendix. The text is supported by a companion website that features a robust set of instructor and student resources: www.routledge.com/cw/halpern. Thought and Knowledge can be used as a core text in critical thinking courses offered in departments of psychology, philosophy, English, or across the humanities and social sciences, or as a supplement in any course where critical thinking is emphasized.

The original three-volume work, first published in 1979, has been revised specially as a single volume paperback which concentrates on the development of Japanese literature and foregoes the original supporting philosophical and religious debate in order to provide a more practical and direct source of reference within the context of literature studies, and other comparative works of literary criticism. The book serves as a guide to the 14 centuries of Japan's unbroken literary tradition.