"The Ethics of Community initiates a conversation between continental philosophy and cultural/literary studies that is long overdue. Illustrating that there is a fundamental ethics in deconstructionist approaches to community that can be provocatively traced in the context of cultural considerations central to African-American and U.S. Latino literature, this is a book about bridging gaps. Luszczynska nimbly traverses the complex terrain of preeminent French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, offering a valuable introduction to the ethical components of their philosophical projects. Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ana Menendez's In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd serve as case studies through which Nancian community and Derridean bearing witness are elaborated. As Luszczynska demonstrates, Morrison's foregrounding of the distinct cultural sensibilities of her black and white characters and Menendez's preoccupation with geographical displacement and exile, themselves activate a deconstructive ethics. In this groundbreaking study, distinct cultural understandings and contexts provide a novel way of thinking through intricacies of Nancy and Derrida's thought while revealing the potential of the novel to re-imagine ways of being in the concrete world. "

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).

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.

David Foster is the most original, challenging, contradictory, risk-taking and infuriating Australian novelist of his generation. To date he has published twelve novels, three collections of novellas and short stories, two books of poetry, and a collection of essays, with several produced radio plays. Foster writes in an Australian tradition of idiosyncratic satire and comedy that may be traced through the work of Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin, Xavier Herbert and David Ireland. His novels are the most wide-ranging and fearless of the Australian novels that have contributed to the late twentieth-century re-examination of Western ideologies and the literary forms in which they are expressed. In this first critical study of David Foster's works, Professor Susan Lever steers us into penetrating the mysteries of Foster's fiction, and provides guidance to readers willing to approach them. The book examines the contradictory nature of his commitments and interests as expressed mainly in his novels. Each of his works of fiction and poetry in the order of publication (except for The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover which are discussed with similar novels) are discussed. The development of Foster's philosophical ideas and technique as a novelist over the 35 years of his writing life to date is followed. The book also examines Foster's letters to Geoffrey Dutton early in his career; his interviews and essays provide some of the background to these novels. The book also furnishes a sense of the Australian context for his work. A brief biography of Foster's early life and a discussion of his approach to satire is also included.

The world of theatre criticism is rapidly changing in its form, function and modes of operation in the twenty-first century. The dominance of the internet has led to a growing trend of selfappointed theatre critics and bloggers who are changing the focus and purpose of the discussion around live performance. Even though the blogosphere has garnered suspicion and hostility from some mainstream newspaper critics, it has also provided significant intellectual and ideological challenges to the increasingly conservative profile of the professional critic. This book features 16 commissioned contributions from scholars, arts journalists and bloggers, as well as a small selection of innovative critical practice. Authors from Australia, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Russia, the UK and the US share their perspectives on relevant historical, theoretical and political contexts influencing the development of the discipline, as well as specific aspects of the contemporary practices and genres of theatre criticism. The book features an introductory essay by its editor, Duska Radosavljevic.

"The Critic in the Modern World" explores the work of six influential literary critics--Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling and James Wood--each of whom occupies a distinct historical moment. It considers how these representative critics have constructed their public personae, the kinds of arguments they have used, and their core principles and philosophies. Spanning three hundred years of cultural history, ""The Critic in the Modern World ""considers the various ways in which literary critics have positioned themselves in relation to the modern tradition of descriptive criticism. In providing a lucid account of each critic's central principles and philosophies, it considers the role of the literary critic as a public figure, interpreting him as someone who is compelled to address the wider issues of individualism and the social implications of the democratising, secularising, liberalising forces of modernity.

Compiled over many years in the 1800s by Edward William Lane, The Arabic-English Lexicon is a massive Arabic-English dictionary based on several medieval Arabic dictionaries, mainly the Taj al-'Arus, or "Crown of the Bride" by al-Zabidi, also written in the 19th century. The Lexicon consists only of Book I, the dictionary; Book II was to contain rare words and explanations, but Lane died before its completion. After his death, Dr. G.P. Badger described Lane's lexicon: "This marvelous work in its fullness and richness, its deep research, correctness and simplicity of arrangement far transcends the Lexicon of any language ever presented to the world." Presented here in eight volumes, this work is one of the most concise and comprehensive Arabic-English dictionaries to date. Volume II continues Book I of the dictionary, which includes the fifth through the seventh letters of the Arabic alphabet, categorized by Arabic, rather than English, characters. EDWARD WILLIAM LANE (1801-1876) was a British translator, lexicographer, and Orientalist. Instead of studying at college as a young man, Lane moved to London with his brother to study engraving, at which time he also began to study Arabic. When his health began failing, he moved to Egypt for a change of atmosphere and to continue his studies. While in Egypt, Lane began to study ancient Egypt, but soon became more entranced by modern customs and society. He relied on Egyptian men to help him gather information, especially on the topic of Egyptian women, on which he wrote many books. Lane also translated One Thousand and One Nights, though his greatest work remains The Arabic-English Lexicon. Born in 1854 in London, England, STANLEY LANE-POOLE was a British historian, orientalist, and archaeologist. Lane-Poole worked in the British Museum from 1874 to 1892, thereafter researching Egyptian archaeology in Egypt. From 1897 to 1904 he was a professor of Arabic studies at Dublin University. Before his death in 1931, Lane-Poole authored dozens of books, including the first book of the Arabic-English Lexicon started by his uncle, E.W. Lane.

From its beginnings in the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne to the virtual worlds of William Gibson's "Neuromancer" and "The Matrix," "Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed" helps students navigate the often perplexing worlds of a perennially popular genre. Drawing on literature as well as example from film and television, the book explores the different answers that criticism has offered to the vexed question, 'what is science fiction?' Each chapter of the book includes case studies of key texts, annotated guides to further reading and suggestions for class discussion to help students master the full range of contemporary critical approaches to the field, including the scientific, technological and political contexts in which the genre has flourished. Ranging from an understanding of the genre through the stereotypes of 1930s pulps through more recent claims that we are living in a science fictional moment, this volume will provide a comprehensive overview of this diverse and fascinating genre.

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.

The ability to construct a nuanced narrative or complex character in the constrained form of the short story has sometimes been seen as the ultimate test of an author's creativity. Yet during the time when the short story was at its most popular-the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-even the greatest writers followed strict generic conventions that were far from subtle. This expanded and updated translation of Florence Goyet's influential La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: Description d'un genre a son apogee (Paris, 1993) is the only study to focus exclusively on this classic period across different continents. Ranging through French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing-particularly the stories of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Akutagawa Ry nosuke-Goyet shows that these authors were able to create brilliant and successful short stories using the very simple 'tools of brevity' of that period. In this challenging and far-reaching study, Goyet looks at classic short stories in the context in which they were read at the time: cheap newspapers and higher-end periodicals. She demonstrates that, despite the apparent intention of these stories to question bourgeois ideals, they mostly affirmed the prejudices of their readers. In doing so, her book forces us to re-think our preconceptions about this 'forgotten' genre.

CASSELL'S DICTIONARY OF FRENCH SYNONYMS ARRANGED IN GROUPS FOR THE CONVENIENCE OF ENGLISH STUDENTS by P. O. CROWHURST. Originally published in U.S.A in 1931. INTRODUCTION: FRENCH is without doubt the foreign language most frequently studied in English-speaking countries today, a fact which may be accounted for in several ways. First, the history of France has in past centuries been closely interwoven with that of England, revealing, here, the spirit of unity linking the two nations, there, the misunderstanding or hostility which divided them. As a result the French tongue found its way into England from the Norman invasion onward, remained in use at the Court until the fourteenth century, shared with Latin the distinction of being the literary language of Europe and became the diplomatic and social speech of the world. Secondly, the geographical situation of France as regards England and the close relationships with the French since the Revolution in America, have facilitated the study of the language, but a third and more potent reason for its present-day popularity was the advent of the Great War in 1914, that gigantic upheaval which threw the nations into physical touch with each other and permitted us to study, at close range, the character and language of our French allies during that unprecedented struggle. It may be said, therefore, that the French language has come to stay, but we must remember that it is infinitely rich in nwanccs and finesse or, as we should say, shades of meaning, so much so that the possibilities of expressing oneself exactly, or making mistakes, are alike unbounded. As an example, the words pendant and dwant are generally given as French equivalents for '*during while affn'u. r, cffrayant, cffr& yctble and

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.