Zhang Longxi, an internationally renowned scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, is your guide to the three-millennia-long history of Chinese literature from the remote antiquity of oracle bones to contemporary works. Professor Zhang charts the development of the major literary forms in Chinese, including poetry, prose, song lyrics, and plays, and introduces the most famous poets and writers and their representative texts. Taking a period-based approach through the major dynasties, he places these forms, texts, and authors within their historical contexts and tells the fascinating story of Chinese literature with copious examples in English translation. He writes in a clear and accessible style and assumes no prior knowledge of Chinese history or Chinese literature. This book is an ideal introduction for students and the general readers who want to get a broad but thorough overview of Chinese literature in all its richness and diversity.

South America is a region that enjoys an unusually high profile as the origin of some of the world's greatest writers and most celebrated footballers. This is the first book to undertake a systematic study of the relationship between football and literature across South America. Beginning with the first football poem published in 1899, it surveys a range of texts that address key issues in the region's social and political history. Drawing on a substantial corpus of short stories, novels and poems, each chapter considers the shifting relationship between football and literature in South America across more than a century of writing. The way in which authors combine football and literature to challenge the dominant narratives of their time suggests that this sport can be seen as a recurring theme through which matters of identity, nationhood, race, gender, violence, politics and aesthetics are played out. This book is fascinating reading for any student, scholar or serious fan of football, as well as for all those interested in the relationship between sports history, literature and society.

Jean Barbot, who served as a commercial agent on French slave-trading voyages to West Africa in 1678-9 and 1681-2, in 1683 began an account of the Guinea coast, based partly on his voyage journals (only one of which is extant) and partly on previous printed sources. The work was interrupted by his flight to England, as a Huguenot refugee, in 1685, and not finished until 1688. When Barbot found that his lengthy French account could not be published, he rewrote it in English, enlarging it even further, and then continually revising it up to his death in 1712. The manuscript was eventually published in 1732. Barbot's book had considerable influence on later European attitudes to Black Africa and the Atlantic slave trade and in modern writings on both subjects is frequently cited as evidence. The French account serves as the base for the present edition and is presented in English translation but additional material in the later English version is inserted. The edition concentrates on Barbot's original information. He copied much from earlier sources - this derived material is omitted but is identified in the notes. The original material, mainly on Senegal, Sierra Leone, River Sess, Gold Coast and the Calabars, is extensively annotated, not least with comparative references to other sources. Apart from its narrative interest, the edition thus provides a starting point for the critical assessment of a range of early sources on Guinea. The edition opens with an introductory essay discussing Barbot's life and career and analysing his sources. Barbot provided a large number of his own drawings of topographical and ethnographical features, in particular drawings of almost all of the European forts in Guinea. Many of these illustrations are reproduced. This volume covers the coast from Senegal to Gold Coast. The main pagination of this and the following volume (Second series 176) series is continuous. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1991.

“Let us, then, set off together on a series of journeys around South Africa with an old kitbag full of books instead of maps to guide us. Let us follow meandering paths through the landscapes of literature, and celebrate how local authors, characters and readers are shaped and inspired by place …”

In this gripping travelogue, Justin Fox goes on a one-of-a-kind journey. Marrying his love for travel and writing, he sets off to explore the places of his favourite books. From the mountainous eastern Karoo of Olive Schreiner to the big-game lowveld of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, from Deneys Reitz’s wide-open Cape interior to the bushveld of Eugène Marais’s Waterberg, Fox reveals the majestic power of place. Through the savannah of Herman Charles Bosman’s Marico, the dusty plains of JM Coetzee’s Moordenaars Karoo, the forests of Dalene Matthee’s Garden Route, the subtropical hamlets of Zakes Mda’s Wild Coast, and finally the sandstone crags of Stephen Watson’s Cederberg, he brings to life the settings we’ve only seen through characters’ eyes.

Place is a moving love letter to South Africa, merging literature and landscape, and taking the reader on a breath-taking journey – into the heart of South Africa’s spectacular landscape and the inner-worlds of its most celebrated authors.

First published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Written by established literature experts, this series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling-typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape-this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the storyworlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman, the book reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing, and governmental policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of transmedia storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergence, popular culture, and historical media industries.

An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly is the first introduction to queer theory written especially for students of literature. Tracking the emergence of queer theory out of gay and lesbian studies, this book pays unique attention to how queer scholars have read some of the most well-known works in the English language. Organized thematically, this book explores queer theoretical treatments of sexual identity, gender and sexual norms and normativity, negativity and utopianism, economics and neoliberalism, and AIDS activism and disability. Each chapter expounds upon foundational works in queer theory by scholars including Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Each chapter also offers readings of primary texts -ranging from the highly canonical, like John Milton's Paradise Lost, to more contemporary works of popular fiction, like Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. Along the way, An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly demonstrates how queer reading methods work alongside other methods like feminism, historicism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. By modelling queer readings, this book invites literature students to develop queer readings of their own. It also suggests that reading queerly is not simply a matter of reading work written by queer people. Queer reading attunes us to the queerness of even the most straightforward text.

Fairies fascinate young and old alike. To some they offer tantalizing glimpses of other worlds, to others a subversive counterpoint to human arrogance and weakness. Like no other author, Katharine Briggs throughout her work communicated the thrill and delight of the world of fairies, and in this book she articulated for the first time the history of that world in tradition and literature. From every period and every country, poets and storytellers have described a magical world inhabited by elfin spirits. Capricious and vengeful, or beautiful and generous, they've held us in thrall for generations. And on a summer's morn, as the dew dries softly on the grass, if you kneel and look under a toadstool, well ...

Meets a real need for a comprehensive and unified guide to teaching literature in translation. Presents a variety of pedagogical approaches and examples from a wide variety of world languages and literary traditions, as well as modes of writing (prose, poetry, drama, film, and religious and historical texts) with the aim that many of the pedagogical approaches and strategies can be easily adapted for use with other works and traditions. Provides an invaluable set of resources for lecturers and instructors within translation studies and literature, especially essential for those teaching texts from languages and cultures with which they may have little or no familiarity.

Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx rests on the principles that storytelling is central to medical encounters between caregivers and patients and that narrative competence enhances medical competence. Thus, the book's goal is to develop the narrative competence of its reader. Grounded in the rhetorical theory of narrative that Phelan has been constructing over the course of his career, this volume utilizes a three-step method: Offering a jargon-free explication of core concepts of narrative such as character, progression, perspective, time, and space. Demonstrating how to use those concepts to interpret a diverse group of medical narratives, including two graphic memoirs. Pointing to the relevance of those demonstrations for caregiver-patient interactions. Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx is the ideal volume for undergraduate students interested in pursuing careers in healthcare, students in medical and allied health professional schools, and graduate students in the health humanities and social sciences.

'The Dedalus Book of the Occult' celebrates the influence of occult thought on some of the central poets and writers of the last two centuries, beginning with the Enlightenment obsession with occult politics and leading through to the deep occult roots of the modernist movement.

In recent decades, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of the supernatural in a Victorian context. Studies of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, magic, and folklore have highlighted that Victorian England was ridden with spectres and learned magicians. Despite this growing body of scholarship, little historiographical work has addressed the Devil. This book demonstrates the significance of the Devil in a Victorian context, emphasising his pervasiveness and diversity. Drawing on a rich array of primary material, including theological and folkloric works, fiction, newspapers and periodicals, and broadsides and other ephemera, it uses the diabolic to explore the Victorians' complex and ambivalent relationship with the supernatural. Both the Devil and hell were theologically contested during the nineteenth century, with an increasing number of both clergymen and laypeople being discomfited by the thought of eternal hellfire. Nevertheless, the Devil continued to play a role in the majority of English denominations, as well as in folklore, spiritualism, occultism, popular culture, literature, and theatre. The Devil and the Victorians will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-century English cultural and religious history, as well as the darker side of the supernatural.

In The Ideology of Conduct, first published in 1987, scholars from various fields, from the medieval period to the present day, discuss literature in which the sole purpose is to instruct women in how to make themselves desirable. This collection investigates how middle-class writers who had long emulated the behaviour of the aristocracy began to criticise that behaviour by formulating an alternative object of desire. They did so without appearing to breed political controversy because it seemed to concern only the female. But writing for and about women in fact became a powerful instrument of hegemony as it introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations, induced certain forms of economic behaviour as desirable in men and women respectively, and insured the reproduction of the nuclear family. It is argued, therefore, that the literature of conduct not only recorded but also assisted the production of our contemporary gender-based culture.

Reissuing works originally published between 1960 and 1995, this varied set offers an outstanding collection of scholarship. It includes topics that touch on psychology, feminist criticism, philosophy and literary history as well as examinations of autobiography as genre.

Thomas Campion, Milton, Crashaw, Herbert, Bourne, Walter Savage Landor - all these poets, between them spanning the period from the Elizabethan to the Victorian age, wrote a substantial body of Latin verse in addition to their better-known English poetry, representing part of the vast and almost unexplored body of Neo-Latin literature which appealed to an international reading public throughout Europe. The Latin poetry of these English poets is of particular interest when it is set against the background of their writings in their own tongue: this collection examines the extent to which our judgment of a poet is altered by an awareness of his Latin works. In some we find prefigured themes which were later treated in their English verse; others wrote Latin poetry throughout their lives and give evidence in their Latin poetry of interests which do not find expression in their English compositions. This volume is a valuable resource for students of both Latin and English literature.

First published in 1992, Subject to Others considers the intersection between late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century British female writers and the colonial debate surrounding slavery and abolition. Beginning with an overview that sets the discussion in context, Moira Ferguson then chronicles writings by Anglo-Saxon women and one African-Caribbean ex-slave woman, from between 1670 and 1834, on the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves. Through studying the writings of around thirty women in total, Ferguson concludes that white British women, as a result of their class position, religious affiliation and evolving conceptions of sexual difference, constructed a colonial discourse about Africans in general and slaves in particular. Crucially, the feminist propensity to align with anti-slavery activism helped to secure the political self-liberation of white British women. A fascinating and detailed text, this volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students researching colonial British female writers, early feminist discourse, and the anti-slavery debate.

Science Fiction and Cultural Theory: A Reader is an essential resource for literature students studying science fiction, science and popular culture, and contemporary theory. This book combines key theories that have become touchstones for work in the field with more recent thinking to showcase how theoretical paradigms central to science fiction such as posthumanism and mediation have become central to critical theory overall in the twenty-first century. The book is divided into four parts: Gender, Technology and the Body The Science-Fictionalization of Everyday Life Media, Mediation, Science Fiction Posthumanisms Each part will not only to outline the central critical trends in the study of science fiction across media but will also to show dialogue and exchange as these concepts are refined. Each section will conclude with a list of recommendations for further reading. In this volume Sherryl Vint brings together the most important critical essays and approaches to the study science fiction over the last 40 years to create an ideal resource for classrooms.

Labelled "an elegant Jeremiah" by a journalist of his day, the urbane Victorian Matthew Arnold must have received the comparison with the Old Testament prophet uneasily. Writing in the 1970s, Norman Mailer seems to owe nothing to the biblical for his description of a long hot wait to buy a cold drink while reporting on the first voyage to the moon. Yet both Arnold and Mailer, George P. Landow asserts in this book, are sages, writers in the nonfiction prose form of secular prophecy, a genre richly influenced by the episodic structures and harshly critical attitudes toward society which characterize Old Testament prophetic literature. In this book, first published in 1986, Landow defines the genre by exploring its rhetoric, an approach that enables him to illuminate the relationships among representative works of the nineteenth century to one another, to biblical, oratorical, and homiletic traditions, and to such twentieth-century writers as Lawrence, Didion, and Mailer.

First published in 1980, The Anatomy of Literary Studies provides students of English Literature with a clearer understanding of the significance and scope of the subject and a comprehensive background to its study. It gives pointers towards intellectual integrity and advice on independent study, libraries, essay writing and examinations. This reissue of Marjorie Boulton's classic work will be of particular value to students studying English at university or those applying to a course who would like a fuller understanding of what it might entail.

This expansive Companion offers a set of fresh perspectives on the wealth of texts produced in and around what is now the United States. Highlights the diverse voices that constitute American literature, embracing oral traditions, slave narratives, regional writing, literature of the environment, and more Demonstrates that American literature was multicultural before Europeans arrived on the continent, and even more so thereafter Offers three distinct paradigms for thinking about American literature, focusing on: genealogies of American literary study; writers and issues; and contemporary theories and practices Enables students and researchers to generate richer, more varied and more comprehensive readings of American literature

This book explores the historical and cultural significance of comics in languages other than English, examining the geographic and linguistic spheres which these comics inhabit and their contributions to comic studies and academia. The volume brings together texts across a wide range of genres, styles and geographic locations including the Netherlands, Latin America, Greece, Sweden, Poland, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, the Czech Republic, among others. These works have remained out of reach for speakers of languages other than the original and do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve due to their lack of English translations. This book highlights the richness and diversity these works add to the corpus of comic art and comic studies that Anglophone comics scholars can access to broaden the collective perspective of the field and forge links across regions, genres and comic traditions. Part of the Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series, this volume spans many continents and languages. It will be of interest to researchers and students of comics studies, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, art and design, illustration, history, film studies and sociology.

Business and the businessman have had a fundamental place in American society since the inception of the nation. This tenet, the 'gospel of wealth', is a central concern in the novels of Theodore Dreiser and his contemporaries. First published in 1987, this study sets this group of writers in their historical context and shows how they elaborated the idea of wealth as an object of quasi-religious quest. What had previously been associated with disease and darkness, avarice and dishonour, now came to emblematise the virtues of thrift, prudence and diligence. The underlying argument is that the dominant group of a society legitimises its power through the appropriation of the vocabulary of religion, and the American business leaders were successful in doing this both in their own practice and through the more insidious medium of art. A detailed analysis, this reissue will be of particular value to students of American literature with an interest in the relationship between linguistic symbols and social order, and historical attitudes towards wealth in literature.

First published in 1987 (this second edition in 1992), the Handbook of Latin American Literature offers readers the opportunity to explore this literary history in the English Language and constitutes an ideological approach to Latin American Literature. It provides both concise information concerning particular authors, works, and literary traditions of Latin America as well as comprehensive material about the various national literatures of the area. This book will therefore be of interest to Hispanic scholars, as well as more general readers and non-Hispanists.