How do our institutions shape us, and how do we shape them? From the late nineteenth-century era of high imperialism to the rise of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, the concept of the institution was interrogated and rethought in literary and intellectual culture. In Institutional Character, Robert Higney investigates the role of the modernist novel in this reevaluation, revealing how for a diverse array of modernist writers, character became an attribute of the institutions of the state, international trade, communication and media, labor, education, public health, the military, law, and beyond. In readings of figures from the works of E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf to Mulk Raj Anand, Elizabeth Bowen, and Zadie Smith, Higney presents a new history of character in modernist writing. He simultaneously tracks how writers themselves turned to the techniques of fiction to help secure a place in the postwar institutions of literary culture. In these narratives-addressing imperial administrations, global financial competition, women's entry into the professions, colonial nationalism, and wartime espionage-we are shown the generative power of institutions in preserving the past, designing the present, and engineering the future, and the constitutive involvement of individuals in collective life.

Robert Crumb (b. 1943) read widely and deeply a long roster of authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, J. D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as religious classics including biblical, Buddhist, Hindu, and Gnostic texts. Crumb's genius, according to author David Stephen Calonne, lies in his ability to absorb a variety of literary, artistic, and spiritual traditions and incorporate them within an original, American mode of discourse that seeks to reveal his personal search for the meaning of life. R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self contains six chapters that chart Crumb's intellectual trajectory and explore the recurring philosophical themes that permeate his depictions of literary and biographical works and the ways he responds to them through innovative, dazzling compositional techniques. Calonne explores the ways Crumb develops concepts of solitude, despair, desire, and conflict as aspects of the quest for self in his engagement with the book of Genesis and works by Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Beats, Charles Bukowski, and Philip K. Dick, as well as Crumb's illustrations of biographies of musicians Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton. Calonne demonstrates how Crumb's love for literature led him to attempt an extremely faithful rendering of the texts he admired while at the same time highlighting for his readers the particular hidden philosophical meanings he found most significant in his own autobiographical quest for identity and his authentic self.

A hierarchical model of human societies' relations with the natural world is at the root of today's climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton's concept of the ""mesh"" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to effectively channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.How can narrative undermine linearity in order to reject notions of unlimited technological progress and economic growth? What does it mean to say that nonhuman materials and processes from contaminated landscapes to natural evolution can become characters in stories? And, conversely, how can narrative trace the rising awareness of climate change in the thick of human characters' mental activities? These are some of the questions Narrating the Mesh addresses by engaging with contemporary works by Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Powers, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeanette Winterson, and many others. Entering interdisciplinary debates on narrative and the Anthropocene, this book explores how stories can bridge the gap between scientific models of the climate and the human-scale world of everyday experience, powerfully illustrating the complexity of the ecological crisis at multiple levels.

This book identifies a strand of what it calls "Accidental Orientalism" in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through historical accident and who wrote about their experiences in Italian, English, and French. Among them are young woman, Amalia Nizzoli, who learned Arabic, conversed the inhabitants of an Ottoman-Egpytian harem, and wrote a memoir in Italian; a young man, Giovanni Finati, who converted to Islam, passed as Albanian in Muhammad Ali's Egypt, and published his memoir in English; a strongman turned antiquarian, Giovanni Belzoni, whose narrative account in English documents the looting of antiquities by Europeans in Egypt ; a princess and patriot, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, who lived in exile in Anatolia and wrote in French condemning the Ottoman harem and proposing social reforms in in the Ottoman empire; and an early twentieth century anarchist and anti-colonialist, Leda Rafanelli, who converted to Islam, wrote prolifically, and posed before the camera in an Orient of her own fashioning. Crossing class, gender, dress, and religious boundaries as they move about the Mediterranean basin, their accounts variously reconfigure, reconsolidate, and often destabilize the imagined East-West divide. Ranging widely on an affective spectrum from Islamophobia to Islamophilia, their narratives are the occasion for the book's reflection on the practices of cultural cross-dressing, conversion to Islam, and passing and posing as Muslim on the part of Italians who had themselves the object of an Orientalization on the part of Northern Europeans, and whose language had long been the lingua franca of the Mediterranean.

This thoroughly updated fourth edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism; postcolonial criticism, and ecocriticism. This new edition features: * A brand new chapter on ecocriticism, including sections on deep ecology, eco-Marxism, ecofeminism (including radical, Marxist, and vegetarian ecofeminisms), and postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental justice * Considerable updates to the chapters on feminist theory, African American theory, postcolonial theory, and LGBTQ theories, including the terminology and theoretical concepts * An extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and a variety of literary texts * A list of specific questions critics ask about literary texts * An interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory * A list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works * Updated and expanded bibliographies Both engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.

In Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, Nathan J. Rabalais examines the impact of Louisiana's remarkably diverse cultural and ethnic groups on folklore characters and motifs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Establishing connections between Louisiana and France, West Africa, Canada, and the Antilles, Rabalais explores how folk characters, motifs, and morals adapted to their new contexts in Louisiana. By viewing the state's folklore in the light of its immigration history, he demonstrates how folktales can serve as indicators of sociocultural adaptation as well as contact among cultural communities. In particular, he examines the ways in which collective traumas experienced by Louisiana's major ethnic groups-slavery, the grand d? (R)rangement, linguistic discrimination-resulted in fundamental changes in these folktales in relation to their European and African counterparts. Rabalais points to the development of an altered moral economy in Cajun and Creole folktales. Conventional heroic qualities, such as physical strength, are subverted in Louisiana folklore in favor of wit and cunning. Analyses of Black Creole animal tales like those of Bouki et Lapin and Tortie demonstrate the trickster hero's ability to overcome both literal and symbolic entrapment through cleverness. Some elements of Louisiana's folklore tradition, such as the rougarou and cauchemar, remain an integral presence in the state's cultural landscape, apparent in humor, popular culture, regional branding, and children's books. Through its adaptive use of folklore, French and Creole Louisiana will continue to retell old stories in innovative ways as well as create new stories for future generations.

When you drink rum, you drink history. More than merely a popular spirit in the transatlantic, rum became a cultural symbol of the Caribbean. While rum is often dismissed as set dressing in texts about the region, the historical and moral associations of alcohol generally-and rum specifically-cue powerful stereotypes, from touristic hedonism to social degeneracy. Rum Histories examines the drink in anglophone Atlantic literature in the period of decolonization to complicate and elevate the symbolic currency of a commodity that in fact reflects the persistence of colonialism in shaping the material and mental lives of postcolonial subjects. As a product of the plantation and as an intoxicant, rum was a central lubricant of the colonial economy as well as of cultural memory. Discussing a wide spectrum of writing, from popular contemporary works such as Christopher Moore's Fluke and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland to classics by Michelle Cliff, V. S. Naipaul, and other luminaries of the Caribbean diaspora, Jennifer Nesbitt investigates how rum's specific role in economic exploitation is muddled by moral attitudes about the consequences of drinking. The centrality of alcohol use to racialized and gendered norms guides Nesbitt's exploration of how the global commodities trade connects disparate populations across history and geography. This innovative study reveals rum's fascinating role in expressing the paradox of a postcolonial world still riddled with the legacies of colonialism.

York Notes for GCSE offer an exciting approach to English Literature and will help you to achieve a better grade. This market-leading series has been completely updated to reflect the needs of today's students. The new editions are packed with detailed summaries, commentaries on key themes, characters, language and style, illustrations, exam advice and much more. Written by GCSE examiners and teachers, York Notes are the authoritative guides to exam success.

Through knowledge societies, people have capabilities to acquire information and to transform that information into knowledge and information, which empowers them to enhance their lives and to contribute to the social-economic development. The practical application of knowledge into innovation and how this process from research to development to application can be achieved is a domain that is not yet very well understood. Developing Knowledge Societies for Distinct Country Contexts is an essential reference source that documents methods, best practices, and case studies for the development of global knowledge societies at the national, regional, and local levels. Featuring empirical analysis on topics such as smart governance, financial literacy, and globalization, this book is ideally designed for business strategists, economists, international researchers, anthropologists, politicians, policymakers, governmental sectors, academics, and students seeking coverage on the development of knowledge society policies and strategies in various areas of the world.

Founded in 1961, Studia Hibernica is devoted to the study of the Irish language and its literature, Irish history and archaeology, Irish folklore and place names, and related subjects. Its aim is to present the research of scholars in these fields of Irish studies and so to bring them within easy reach of each other and the wider public. It endeavours to provide in each issue a proportion of articles, such as surveys of periods or theme in history or literature, which will be of general interest. A long review section is a special feature of the journal and all new publications within its scope are there reviewed by competent authorities.