Joseph O'Neill's novel, Netherland, has won many prestigious awards and recognitions, including the PEN/Faulker Award and The New York Times Book Review's "Best Book of the Year." This book, written and published in the first decade of the 21st century, accurately captures the zeitgeist of the American people and American people's perception about American politics, War against Terror, and American capitalism. Dr. Heerak Christian Kim, who has identified the literary device of "The Key Signifier," analyzes Joseph's O'Neill's book, Netherland, with the view to understanding the current irregularities in US domestic politics as well as the general zeitgeist of the American people. There is no question that the first decade of the 21st century has been the most "odd" decade of American history in terms of politics. The anti-Washington sentiment that is sweeping the nation from the agricultural heartland of America and the labor-centric cities of America, such as Boston, is creating unprecedented questioning of what makes America what it is and the values that motivate the American people. Professor Kim's important historical-literary criticism book on Joseph O'Neill's novel, Netherland, provides valuable insights into understanding the current trends in American society. This book is a valuable resource for not only literary critics and English teachers, but also for the educated public interested in understanding current trends in American society and politics. Dr. Heerak Christian Kim is the author of the scholarly monograph, Key Signifier as Literary Device: Its Definition and Function in Literature and Media.

Here at last is a comprehensive introduction to the career of America's leading intellectual. "The Anatomy of Bloom" surveys Harold Bloom's life as a literary critic, exploring all of his books in chronological order, to reveal that his work, and especially his classic "The Anxiety of Influence," is best understood as an expression of reprobate American Protestantism and yet haunted by a Jewish fascination with the Holocaust. Heys traces Bloom's intellectual development from his formative years spent as a poor second-generation immigrant in the Bronx to his later eminence as an international literary phenomenon. He argues that, as the quintessential living embodiment of the American dream, Bloom's career-path deconstructs the very foundations of American Protestantism.

The book explores the complex world of Islam from the perspective of its adherents and activists in Azerbaijan. Baku, the most secular Muslim capital city, is a battlefield for the minds and souls of "ethnic Muslims." Visiting pirs was till now the typical expression of religiosity among Azerbaijani Muslims. Sunni-Shia division was blurred. Nowadays, Shia and Sunni Muslim movements propose new distinctive identities. Foreign and local preachers took advantage of liberal religious policies of the 1990s to promote their ideas. Salafis stress the "pristine" Islam and the idea of universalism, while Shias underline rationality in their faith tradition. Turkish model of Islam is more inclusive towards local customs. Sufism, although not as powerful as before, also finds a committed audience. Finally, independent charismatic local leaders gain supporters. The book investigates how this pluralism affects both religious groups and believers. Competitive environment requires effective strategies and flexibility. In this process, the traditional dominance of Shiism is challenged by Sunni movements. Shiism, however, is not giving up and adapts its concepts and practices to contemporary contexts.

In 1939, Aleksandr Volkov (1891-1977) published Wizard of the Emerald City, a revised version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Only a line on the copyright page explained the book as a "reworking" of the American story. Readers credited Volkov as author rather than translator. Volkov, an unknown and inexperienced author before World War II, tried to break into the politically charged field of Soviet children's literature with an American fairy tale. During the height of Stalin's purges, Volkov adapted and published this fairy tale in the Soviet Union despite enormous, sometimes deadly, obstacles. Marketed as Volkov's original work, Wizard of the Emerald City spawned a series that was translated into more than a dozen languages and became a staple of Soviet popular culture, not unlike Baum's fourteen-volume Oz series in the United States. Volkov's books inspired a television series, plays, films, musicals, animated cartoons, and a museum. Today, children's authors and fans continue to add volumes to the Magic Land series. Several generations of Soviet Russian and Eastern European children grew up with Volkov's writings, yet know little about the author and even less about his American source, L. Frank Baum. Most Americans have never heard of Volkov and know nothing of his impact in the Soviet Union, and those who do know of him regard his efforts as plagiarism. Erika Haber demonstrates how the works of both Baum and Volkov evolved from being popular children's literature and became compelling and enduring cultural icons in both the US and USSR/Russia, despite being dismissed and ignored by critics, scholars, and librarians for many years.

The Spectator is a major figure of the French Enlightenment whose far-reaching significance has not been fully grasped. As a basic organising principle of culture production in France of the early and mid-eighteenth century, the Spectator is an intermediary figure residing between the ancien regime and France of the Revolution. This transitional moment can be read in - and, furthermore, was prepared by - the emergence of several new literary genres in which, paradoxically, a Spectator was allotted the principle role. This study traces the process in which the king's disenfranchised subjects, at first limited merely to looking on at the spectacle of royal authority and privilege, began to evolve through versatile Spectator roles into citizen subjects. Each of four chapters reveals the significance of these figures to the development of a particular genre or disciplinary formation: Spectator journalism, art criticism, fiction of voyage and the exotic, and alternative popular theater (the theatre de la joie). These genres designate the Spectator as constituing the narrative, thematic, textual focus that articulates contemporary life, foreign exotic cultures, art objects and knowledge itself. In the shift from a silent, near- invisible audience to a more active, more sharply delineated entity of Spectators - for whom, and in function of whom, not only literary and social production but the monarchy itself were increasingly obliged to perform - a vital and as yet untold story of early and mid-eighteenth-century culture is recounted.

Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) stands outside the traditional canon of twentieth-century French philosophers. Where he is not simply forgotten or overlooked, he is dismissed as a 'relentlessly unsystematic' thinker, or, following Jean-Paul Sartre's lead, labelled a 'Christian existentialist' - a label that avoids consideration of Marcel's work on its own terms. How is one to appreciate Marcel's contribution, especially when his uvre appears to be at odds with philosophical convention? Helen Tattam proposes a range of readings as opposed to one single interpretation, a series of departures or explorations that bring his work into contact with critical partners such as Henri Bergson, Paul Ric ur and Emmanuel Levinas, and offer insights into a host of twentieth-century philosophical shifts concerning time, the subject, the other, ethics, and religion. Helen Tattam's ambitious study is an impressively lucid account of Marcel's engagement with the problem of time and lived experience, and is her first monograph since the award of her doctorate from the University of Nottingham.

WOLFGANG ISER: STEPPING FORWARD Wolfgang Iser's books include The Implied Reader (1974), The Act of Reading (1978), Prospecting (1989) and The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993). He has written books on Laurence Sterne (1988) and Walter Pater (1987). He was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Constance in Germany.

This book of lectures, essays and interviews includes pieces on Wolfgang Iser's work in reader-response theory, the literary text, British culture, and Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones. The interviews contain many insights into the nature of reading, one of Iser's key areas of research.

Includes bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861713865.

www.crmoon.com

This book explores Native American literary responses to biomedical discourses and biomedicalization processes as they circulate in social and cultural contexts. Native American communities resist reductivism of biomedicine that excludes Indigenous (and non-Western) epistemologies and instead draw attention to how illness, healing, treatment, and genetic research are socially constructed and dependent on inherently racialist thinking. This volume highlights how interventions into the hegemony of biomedicine are vigorously addressed in Native American literature. The book covers tuberculosis and diabetes epidemics, the emergence of Native American DNA, discoveries in biotechnology, and the problematics of a biomedical model of psychiatry. The book analyzes work by Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, LeAnne Howe, Linda Hogan, Heid E. Erdrich, Elissa Washuta and Frances Washburn. The book will appeal to scholars of Native American and Indigenous Studies, as well as to others with an interest in literature and medicine.

From Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, this is a comprehensive guide to comedy in the English literary canon. Beginning with a critical exploration of historical and philosophical theories of humour, the book then supplies close-readings of a wide range of major texts, authors and genres from the Medieval period to the present. The Comic Mode in English Literature examines such texts as: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's DreamPope's The Rape of the LockAusten's EmmaDickens' The Pickwick PapersWilde's The Importance of Being EarnestAmis's Lucky Jim Covering poetry, prose and drama, this comprehensive guide will be essential reading for students of comic writing, literary history and genre.

The impact of the African Diaspora in Spanish America is far greater than is understood or acknowledged in the English speaking world. Connected initially to the Spanish-Caribbean through trans-Atlantic slavery, Africa is so deeply ingrained in the biology and culture of these countries that, in the words of the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, it would require the work of a 'miniaturist to disentangle that hieroglyph.' Through complex explorations of narratives of Spanish Blacks in the Caribbean this collection of essays builds critically on mid and late twentieth century Afro-Hispanist scholarship and thereby amplifies the terms in which Africans in the Americas are generally discussed. Each of these essays deals with a pivotal aspect of the African experience in the Spanish speaking Caribbean from the period of slavery to the present day. The essays focus on Black African cultures in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic as well as in the circum Caribbean areas of Mexico and Colombia. In the process they cover a vast and highly involved range of issues including abolition and the politics of anti-slavery rhetoric, African women's political activism, performance poetry and female embodiment of the Black Diaspora, the Cuban Revolution and its investment in African liberation struggles, race and intra-Caribbean migration, ritualised spirituality and African healing practices among others. Through their investigation of both official and popular cultures in the Caribbean not only do the essays in this volume show the indispensable functions of African cultural capital in the Spanish speaking Caribbean but they also underline the multiple demographic, socio-political and institutional imperatives that are at stake in considering contemporary understandings of the African Diaspora. ______________________________________ Conrad James received his PhD in Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge and teaches Spanish Caribbean and US Latino literature at the University of Birmingham. He taught previously at the University of Durham and has held visiting positions at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Maryland. James has published widely on Cuban women's writing and Afro-Cuban literature of the 20th century. He has also worked on Dominican and Dominican-American fiction and poetry.

Humphrey Llwyd's Breviary of Britain (1573) is both the first Tudor description of Britain and a passionate and learned defence of Welsh historical traditions. Featuring the first reference in English to the 'British Empire', Thomas Twyne's translation would influence Elizabethan writers from Michael Drayton to John Dee. The volume also includes relevant illustrative selections of David Powel's History of Cambria (1584). Based on Llwyd's own translation of the medieval Welsh chronicle, Brut y Tywysogyon, Powel's History was an important source for Spenser's Faerie Queene and Drayton's Poly-Olbion, and remained the standard history of medieval Wales until the nineteenth century. Philip Schwyzer is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature in the Department of English, University of Exeter. He has published extensively on Anglo-Welsh literary relations and visions of British antiquity in the early modern period. His books include Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (2004), Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (2007); he is co-editor with Willy Maley of Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (2010).

In Dining with Madmen: Fat, Food, and the Environment in 1980s Horror, author Thomas Fahy explores America's preoccupation with body weight, processed foods, and pollution through the lens of horror. Conspicuous consumption may have communicated success in the eighties, but only if it did not become visible on the body. American society had come to view fatness as a horrifying transformation-it exposed the potential harm of junk food, gave life to the promises of workout and diet culture, and represented the country's worst consumer impulses, inviting questions about the personal and environmental consequences of excess. While changing into a vampire or a zombie often represented widespread fears about addiction and overeating, it also played into concerns about pollution. Ozone depletion, acid rain, and toxic waste already demonstrated the irrevocable harm being done to the planet. The horror genre-from A Nightmare on Elm Street to American Psycho-responded by presenting this damage as an urgent problem, and, through the sudden violence of killers, vampires, and zombies, it depicted the consequences of inaction as terrifying. Whether through Hannibal Lecter's cannibalism, a vampire's thirst for blood in The Queen of the Damned and The Lost Boys, or an overwhelming number of zombies in George Romero's Day of the Dead, 1980s horror uses out-of-control hunger to capture deep-seated concerns about the physical and material consequences of unchecked consumption. Its presentation of American appetites resonated powerfully for audiences preoccupied with body size, food choices, and pollution. And its use of bodily change, alongside the bloodlust of killers and the desolate landscapes of apocalyptic fiction, demanded a recognition of the potentially horrifying impact of consumerism on nature, society, and the self.

The volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause. The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis.

Global Appetites explores how industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements underpin US conceptions of global power in the century since the First World War. Allison Carruth's study centers on what she terms the 'literature of food' - a body of work that comprises literary realism, late modernism and magical realism along with culinary writing, food memoir and advertising. Through analysis of American texts ranging from Willa Cather's novel O Pioneers! (1913) to Novella Carpenter's non-fiction work Farm City (2009), Carruth argues that stories about how the United States cultivates, distributes and consumes food imbue it with the power to transform social and ecological systems around the world. Lively and accessible, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars of American literature and culture as well as those working in the fields of food studies, food policy, agriculture history, social justice and the environmental humanities.

This study of the construction of race in American culture takes its title from a central story thread in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck, who resolves to ""go to hell"" rather than turn over the runaway slave Jim, in time betrays his companion. Jeff Abernathy assesses cross-racial pairings in American literature following Huckleberry Finn to show that this pattern of engagement and betrayal appears repeatedly in our fiction?notably southern fiction?just as it appears throughout American history and culture. He contends that such stories of companionship and rejection express opposing tenets of American culture: a persistent vision of democracy and the racial hierarchy that undermines it. Abernathy traces this pattern through works by William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Kaye Gibbons, Sara Flanigan, Elizabeth Spencer, Padgett Powell, Ellen Douglas, and Glasgow Phillips. He then demonstrates how African American writers pointedly contest the pattern. The works of Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright, for example, ""portray autonomous black characters and white characters who must earn their own salvation, or gain it not at all.

Though the progress of technology continually pushes life towards virtual existence, the last decade has witnessed a renewed focus on materiality. Radical Interface: Transdisciplinary Interventions on Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman bears witness to literary theorists', digital humanists', rhetoricians', philosophers', and designers' attention to the crafted environment, the manner in which artifacts mediate human relations, and the constitution of a world in which the boundary between humans and things has seemingly imploded. The essays reflect on questions about the extent to which we ought to view humans and nonhuman artifacts as having equal capacity for agency and life, and the ways in which technological mediation challenges the central tenets of humanism and anthropocentrism. Contemporary theories of human-object relations presage the arrival of the posthuman, which is no longer a futuristic or science-fictional concept but rather one descriptive of the present, and indeed, the past. Discussions of the posthuman already have a long history in fields like literary theory, rhetoric, and philosophy, and as advances in design and technology result in increasingly engaging artifacts that mediate more and more aspects of everyday life, it becomes necessary to engage in a systematic, interdisciplinary, critical examination of the intersection of the domains of design, technological mediation, and the posthuman. Radical Interface thus brings diverse disciplines together to foster a dialog on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

The Lawyer in Dickens takes a closer look at the construction of his types of lawyers. While Dickens's critique of the legal system and its representatives is almost proverbial, a closer look at his lawyers uncovers a complex and ambiguous construction that questions their status as Victorian gentlemen. These characters offer a complex psychology that often surpasses their minor or stereotypical role within various Dickens novels, for they act not only as alter egos for different protagonists, but also exhibit behaviour that reveals their abusive attitude towards women. This book argues that Uriah Heep lays the groundwork for Dickens's conception of the lawyer in his later works. The close analysis identifies a strong anxiety about the uncertain social status of professionals in the law, but also unfolds a deeply troubled attitude towards women. The novels express admiration for the lawyer's professional power, yet the individual characters are simultaneously exposed as ungentlemanly. This discussion shows that the lawyer in Dickens is a difficult creature not only because of his professional ambition and social transgression, but also because of his intrusion into the domestic space and into the lives of others, especially women.

Jorge Luis Borges is, undeniably, Argentina's best-known and most influential writer. In addition to scholarly studies of his work, his emblematic figure continues to appear on book covers and carrier bags, in biographies, plaques and statues, photographs and interviews, as well as cartoons and city tours. The Making of Jorge Luis Borges as an Argentine Cultural Icon argues that the ideas and expectations that Argentine people have placed upon the author - thus constructing the icon - are also those that allow them to define their cultural identity. The book examines these intertwined processes by analysing the image of Borges in biographies, photographs, comic strips and urban spaces and the socio-political, historical and cultural contexts in which they were produced. The study seeks not to reveal a Borgesian essence but, rather, to expose the complexity of the ongoing mechanisms which construct Borges the icon. Despite the vast amount of biographical and critical work about the writer that has been produced in Argentina and abroad, The Making of Jorge Luis Borges as an Argentine Cultural Icon is the first in-depth, comprehensive examination of the construction of the author as an Argentine cultural icon.

Maria Graham's story is as remarkable as her work, and this biography not only narrates her life but also delves into the representation she made of herself in her published and unpublished journals, diaries, memoirs, and letters. The result of her endeavours is a literary persona that appears far removed from the controversial woman that she actually was. Who is the woman behind the texts? How did she conceive them? Was she simply one of many other adventurous and articulate female authors of the nineteenth century, or did she for some reason stand apart? This book shows how she manufactured her identity at times by conforming to, challenging, or ignoring the rules of society regarding women's behaviour. She was a child of the Enlightenment in that she valued knowledge above all things, yet she flavoured her discoveries with a taste of romanticism. Her search took her to distant lands where she captured for her readers foreign cultural manifestations, exotic landscapes, and obscure religious rites; yet a reading of her work generates the impression that despite the dramatic descriptions of peoples and places, Graham's subject was, simply, herself. What we know of her story comes mainly from her own narratives, although there are significant letters to, from, and about her that round up the analysis. This biography reconstructs Maria Graham's literary image by means of significant passages of her work, memoirs, diaries, journals, and letters. The chosen texts are meant to illustrate salient features of her style and of her interaction with the prevalent ideologies of her time. The intention is to display a groundbreaking female intellectual who captured for her readers the ancientculture of India as deftly as she represented bloodthirsty bandits in the north of Italy or nascent countries in South America.

Reading These United States explores the relationship between early American literature and federalism in the early decades of the republic. As a federal republic, the United States constituted an unusual model of national unity, defined by the representation of its variety rather than its similarities. Taking the federal structure of the nation as a foundational point, Keri Holt examines how popular print?including almanacs, magazines, satires, novels, and captivity narratives?encouraged citizens to recognize and accept the United States as a union of differences. Challenging the prevailing view that early American print culture drew citizens together by establishing common bonds of language, sentiment, and experience, she argues that early American literature helped define the nation, paradoxically, by drawing citizens apart?foregrounding, rather than transcending, the regional, social, and political differences that have long been assumed to separate them. The book offers a new approach for studying print nationalism that transforms existing arguments about the political and cultural function of print in the early United States, while also offering a provocative model for revising the concept of the nation itself. Holt also breaks new ground by incorporating an analysis of literature into studies of federalism and connects the literary politics of the early republic with antebellum literary politics?a bridge scholars often struggle to cross.