A passionate book of poetry from New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich.In this important collection, award-winning author Louise Erdrich has selected poems from her two previous books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, and has added nineteen new poems to compose Original Fire. "These molten poems radiate with the ferocity of desire, and in them Erdrich does not spin verse so much as tell tales--of betrayal and revenge, of hunting and being hunted."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the relevance of borders and bordering as a spatial paradigm in Anglophone studies. It sets out to provide a critical counter-narrative to the 1990s globalization argument of a "borderless" world by insisting on the significant roles borders play. The essays range in subject matter from geography, history, British and American literature to painting and Reggae music and map out different conceptualisations of the border: place, line, process, contact zones, etc. The volume's cross-border "narrative" serves as a point of communication between the local and the global, between Europe and America, between different literary and artistic genres, thus challenging the divides of geography and literature, between "real" territorial borders and their "fictional" counterparts.

Contributions by Jose Alaniz, Ian Blechschmidt, Paul Fisher Davies, Zanne Domoney-Lyttle, David Huxley, Lynn Marie Kutch, Julian Lawrence, Liliana Milkova, Stiliana Milkova, Kim A. Munson, Jason S. Polley, Paul Sheehan, Clarence Burton Sheffield Jr., and Daniel Worden From his work on underground comix like Zap and Weirdo, to his cultural prominence, R. Crumb is one of the most renowned comics artists in the medium's history. His work, beginning in the 1960s, ranges provocatively and controversially over major moments, tensions, and ideas in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the counterculture and the emergence of the modern environmentalist movement, to racial politics and sexual liberation. While Crumb's early work refined the parodic, over-the-top, and sexually explicit styles we associate with underground comix, he also pioneered the comics memoir, through his own autobiographical and confessional comics, as well as in his collaborations. More recently, Crumb has turned to long-form, book-length works, such as his acclaimed Book of Genesis and Kafka. Over the long arc of his career, Crumb has shaped the conventions of underground and alternative comics, autobiographical comics, and the ""graphic novel."" And, through his involvement in music, animation, and documentary film projects, Crumb is a widely recognized persona, an artist who has defined the vocation of the cartoonist in a widely influential way. The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum is a groundbreaking collection on the work of a pioneer of underground comix and a fixture of comics culture. Ranging from art history and literary studies, to environmental studies and religious history, the essays included in this volume cast Crumb's work as formally sophisticated and complex in its representations of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and history, while also charting Crumb's role in underground comix and the ways in which his work has circulated in the art museum.

In view of the current rhetoric surrounding the global migrant crisis - with politicians comparing refugees with animals and media reports warning of migrants swarming like insects or trespassing like wolves - this timely study explores the cultural origins of the language and imagery of dehumanization. Situated at the junction of literature, politics, and ecocriticism, Wolves at the Door traces the history of the wolf metaphor in discussions of race, gender, colonialism, fascism, and ecology. How have 'Gypsies', Jews, Native Americans but also 'wayward' women been 'wolfed' in literature and politics? How has the wolf myth been exploited by Hitler, Mussolini and Turkish ultra-nationalism? How do right-wing politicians today exploit the reappearance of wolves in Central Europe in the context of the migration discourse? And while their reintroduction in places like Yellowstone has fuelled heated debates, what is the wolf's role in ecological rewilding and for the restoration of biodiversity? In today's fraught political climate, Wolves at the Door alerts readers to the links between stereotypical images, their cultural history, and their political consequences. It raises awareness about xenophobia and the dangers of nationalist idolatry, but also highlights how literature and the visual arts employ the wolf myth for alternative messages of tolerance and cultural diversity.

In Asian Political Cartoons, scholar John A. Lent explores the history and contemporary status of political cartooning in Asia, including East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, North and South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), and South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). Incorporating hundreds of interviews, as well as textual analysis of cartoons; observation of workplaces, companies, and cartoonists at work; and historical research, Lent offers not only the first such survey in English, but the most complete and detailed in any language. Richly illustrated, this volume brings much-needed attention to the political cartoons of a region that has accelerated faster and more expansively economically, culturally, and in other ways than perhaps any other part of the world. Emphasizing the "freedom to cartoon," the author examines political cartoons that attempt to expose, bring attention to, blame or condemn, satirically mock, and caricaturize problems and their perpetrators. Lent presents readers a pioneering survey of such political cartooning in twenty-two countries and territories, studying aspects of professionalism, cartoonists' work environments, philosophies and influences, the state of newspaper and magazine industries, the state's roles in political cartooning, modern technology, and other issues facing political cartoonists. Asian Political Cartoons encompasses topics such as political and social satire in Asia during ancient times, humor/cartoon magazines established by Western colonists, and propaganda cartoons employed in independence campaigns. The volume also explores stumbling blocks contemporary cartoonists must hurdle, including new or beefed-up restrictions and regulations, a dwindling number of publishing venues, protected vested interests of conglomerate-owned media, and political correctness gone awry. In these pages, cartoonists recount intriguing ways they cope with restrictions-through layered hidden messages, by using other platforms, and finding unique means to use cartooning to make a living.

A critique of theory through literature that celebrates the diversity of black being, The Desiring Modes of Being Black explores how literature unearths theoretical blind spots while reasserting the legitimacy of emotional turbulence in the controlled realm of reason that rationality claims to establish. This approach operates a critical shift by examining psychoanalytical texts from the literary perspective of black desiring subjectivities and experiences. This combination of psychoanalysis and the politics of literary interpretation of black texts helps determine how contemporary African American and black literature and queer texts come to defy and challenge the racial and sexual postulates of psychoanalysis or indeed any theoretical system that intends to define race, gender and sexualities. The Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves African American Culture, Fanonian and Caribbean Thought, South African Black Consciousness, French Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Gender and Queer Studies.

In Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre, Richard Murphet presents a close analysis of the theatre practice of two ground-breaking artists - Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp - active over the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century. In addition, he tracks the development of a form of 'epileptic' writing over the course of his own career as writer/director. Murphet argues that these three auteurs have developed subversive alternatives to the previously dominant forms of dramatic realism in order to re-think the relationship between theatre and reality. They write and direct their own work, and their artistic experimentation is manifest in the tension created between their content and their form. Murphet investigates how the works are made, rather than focusing upon an interpretation of their meaning. Through an examination of these artists, we gain a deeper understanding of a late modernist paradigm shift in theatre practice.