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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Novels, other prose & writers > General
What is the ocean's role in human and planetary history? How have
writers, sailors, painters, scientists, historians, and
philosophers from across time and space poetically envisioned the
oceans and depicted human entanglements with the sea? In order to
answer these questions, Soren Frank covers an impressive range of
material in A Poetic History of the Oceans: Greek, Roman and
Biblical texts, an Icelandic Saga, Shakespearean drama, Jens Munk's
logbook, 19th century-writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman
Melville, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Jonas Lie, and
Joseph Conrad as well as their 20th and 21st century-heirs like J.
G. Ballard, Jens Bjorneboe, and Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen. A Poetic
History of the Oceans promotes what Frank labels an amphibian
comparative literature and mobilises recent theoretical concepts
and methodological developments in Blue Humanities, Blue Ecology,
and New Materialism to shed new light on well-known texts and
introduce readers to important, but lesser-known Scandinavian
literary engagements with the sea.
Focusing on relationships between Jewish American authors and
Jewish authors elsewhere in America, Europe, and Israel, this book
explores the phenomenon of authorial affiliation: the ways in which
writers intentionally highlight and perform their connections with
other writers. Starting with Philip Roth as an entry point and
recurring example, David Hadar reveals a larger network of authors
involved in formations of Jewish American literary identity,
including among others Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Nicole Krauss,
and Nathan Englander. He also shows how Israeli writers such as
Sayed Kashua perform their own identities through connections to
Jewish Americans. Whether by incorporating other writers into
fictional work as characters, interviewing them, publishing
critical essays about them, or invoking them in paratext or
publicity, writers use a variety of methods to forge public
personas, craft their own identities as artists, and infuse their
art with meaningful cultural associations. Hadar's analysis deepens
our understanding of Jewish American and Israeli literature,
positioning them in decentered relation with one another as well as
with European writing. The result is a thought-provoking challenge
to the concept of homeland that recasts each of these literary
traditions as diasporic and questions the oft-assumed centrality of
Hebrew and Yiddish to global Jewish literature. In the process,
Hadar offers an approach to studying authorial identity-building
relevant beyond the field of Jewish literature.
Representing a shift in Carter studies for the 21st century, this
book critically explores her legacy and showcases the current state
of Angela Carter scholarship. It gives new insights into Carter's
pyrotechnic creativity and pays tribute to her incendiary
imagination in a reappraisal of Angela Carter's work, her
influences and influence. Drawing attention to the highly
constructed artifice of Angela Carter's work, it brings to the fore
her lesser-known collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine
Profane Pieces to reposition her as more than just the author of
The Bloody Chamber. On the way, it also explores the impact of her
experiences living in Japan, in the light of Edmund Gordon's 2016
biography and Natsumi Ikoma's translation of Sozo Araki's Japanese
memoirs of Carter.
This book explores queer identity in Morocco through the work of
author and LGBT activist Abdellah Taia, who defied the country's
anti-homosexuality laws by publicly coming out in 2006. Engaging
postcolonial, queer and literary theory, Tina Dransfeldt
Christensen examines Taia's art and activism in the context of the
wider debates around sexuality in Morocco. Placing key novels such
as Salvation Army and Infidels in dialogue with Moroccan writers
including Driss Chraibi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, she shows how Taia
draws upon a long tradition of politically committed art in Morocco
to subvert traditional notions of heteronormativity. By giving
space to silenced or otherwise marginalised voices, she shows how
his writings offer a powerful critique of discourses of class,
authenticity, culture and nationality in Morocco and North Africa.
Since his death in 1969, the legend of Jack Kerouac, 'King of the
Beats', has continued to grow. Clark's biography reveals the
essential Kerouac, often through his own words and writings.
Postmodern realist fiction uses realism-disrupting literary
techniques to make interventions into the real social conditions of
our time. It seeks to capture the complex, fragmented nature of
contemporary experience while addressing crucial issues like income
inequality, immigration, the climate crisis, terrorism,
ever-changing technologies, shifting racial, sex and gender roles,
and the rise of new forms of authoritarianism. A lucid,
comprehensive introduction to the genre as well as to a wide
variety of voices, this book discusses more than forty writers from
a diverse range of backgrounds, and over several decades, with
special attention to 21st-century novels. Writers covered include:
Kathy Acker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Julia Alvarez, Sherman
Alexie, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, A.S.
Byatt, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Ana Castillo, Don DeLillo,
Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Awaeki Emezi, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica
Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daisy Johnson,
Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Tommy Orange,
Ruth Ozeki, Ishmael Reed, Eden Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys,
Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jeannette
Winterson, among others.
In Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hedi Bouraoui: A New
Ulysses, Elizabeth Sabiston analyses the dominant theme of
transcultural migration, or immigration, in Hedi Bouraoui's
fiction. His protagonists reflect his passion for endless travel,
and are Ulysses-figures for the postmodern age. Their travels
enable them to explore the "Otherness of the Other," to understand
and "migrate" into them. Bouraoui's World Literature is rooted in
the traversees of his characters across a number of clearly
differentiated regions, which nonetheless share a common humanity.
The ancient migrations of Ulysses, fuelled by violence and war, are
paralleled to the modern displacements of entire cultures and even
nations. Bouraoui's works bridge cultures past and present, but
they also require the invention of language to convey a postmodern
world in flux.
This smart new paperback edition contains the fully-reset text of
three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the
modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and
honour. It features a beautifully decorated text and includes as a
bonus the complete version of Tolkien's acclaimed lecture on Sir
Gawain. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two poems by
an unknown author written in about 1400. Sir Gawain is a romance, a
fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is also much
more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale which
examines religious and social values. Pearl is apparently an elegy
on the death of a child, a poem pervaded with a sense of great
personal loss: but, like Gawain it is also a sophisticated and
moving debate on much less tangible matters. Sir Orfeo is a
slighter romance, belonging to an earlier and different tradition.
It was a special favourite of Tolkien's. The three translations
represent the complete rhyme and alliterative schemes of the
originals, and are uniquely accompanied with the complete text of
Tolkien's acclaimed 1953 W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture that he
delivered on Sir Gawain.
A brand new gangland series by bestselling author Kerry Kaya!Meet
the Tempest family - and get ready for the storm. Tracey Tempest
adores her husband, Terry. But when on his 50th birthday, tragedy
strikes, Tracey must face the terrifying prospect of a future
without him. Desperate for answers and boiling with rage, Tracey
wants revenge... Together with her beloved sons, Ricky and Jamie,
the Tempest family dig deeper into Terry's past - who would want to
kill him, and why? But what they discover changes everything they
knew about the man they loved and risks tearing their own family
apart. Can the Tempests weather the storm or will the past destroy
them all? Perfect for fans of Kimberley Chambers and Martina Cole.
What people are saying about Kerry Kaya! 'Crime writing at its
best! Believable characters - a must read!' Bestselling author
Gillian Godden
Oscar Wilde had one of literary history's most explosive love
affairs with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas. In 1895, Bosie's father,
the Marquess of Queensberry, delivered a note to the Albemarle Club
addressed to "Oscar Wilde posing as sodomite." With Bosie's
encouragement, Wilde sued the Marquess for libel. He not only lost
but he was tried twice for "gross indecency" and sent to prison
with two years' hard labor. With this publication of the uncensored
trial transcripts, readers can for the first time in more than a
century hear Wilde at his most articulate and brilliant. The Real
Trial of Oscar Wilde documents an alarmingly swift fall from grace;
it is also a supremely moving testament to the right to live, work,
and love as one's heart dictates.
Now available in paper, "The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter" is
the first book-length analysis of J. K. Rowling's work from a broad
range of perspectives within literature, folklore, psychology,
sociology, and popular culture. A significant portion of the book
explores the Harry Potter series' literary ancestors, including
magic and fantasy works by Ursula K. LeGuin, Monica Furlong, Jill
Murphy, and others, as well as previous works about the British
boarding school experience. Other chapters explore the moral and
ethical dimensions of Harry's world, including objections to the
series raised within some religious circles. In her new epilogue,
Lana A. Whited brings this volume up to date by covering Rowling's
latest book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."
Is Laurence Sterne one of the great Christian apologists? Ryan
Stark recommends him as such, perhaps to the detriment of the
parson's roguish reputation. The book's aim, however, is not to
dispel roguishness but rather to discern the theological motives
behind Sterne's comic rhetoric, from Tristram Shandy and the
sermons to A Sentimental Journey. To this end, Stark reveals a
veritable avalanche of biblical themes and allusions to be found in
Sterne, often and seemingly awkwardly in the middle of sex jokes,
and yet the effect is not to produce irreverence. On the contrary,
we find an irreverently reverent apologetic, Stark argues, and a
priest who knows how to play gracefully with religious ideas.
Through Sterne, in fact, we might rethink humour's role in the
service of religion.
Key Features: * Study methods * Introduction to the text *
Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual
analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and
literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches *
Chronology * Glossary of literary terms
For anyone who loved St Trinian's - old or new - or loves a cozy
mystery on a grand estate filled with rather 'interesting'
characters. When an American stranger turns up claiming to be the
rightful owner of the school's magnificent country estate it could
spell trouble for everyone at St Bride's . . . No one can believe
it when the headmistress, Hairnet, instantly accepts the stranger's
claim, not: the put-upon Bursar, ousted from his cosy estate
cottage by the stranger the enigmatic Max Security, raring to
engage in a spot of espionage the sensible Judith Gosling, who
knows more about Lord Bunting than she's letting on the
irrepressible Gemma Lamb, determined to keep the school open Only
fickle maths teacher Oriana Bliss isn't suspicious of the stranger,
after all she can just marry him and secure St Bride's future
forever. That's if inventive pranks by the girls - and the school
cat - don't drive him away first. Who will nab the stranger first?
Oriana with the parson's noose? Gemma with sinister secrets? Or
could this be the end of St Bride's? Previously published by Debbie
Young as Stranger at St Bride's.
The essays in this collection provide in-depth analyses of Samuel
Beckett's major works in the context of his international presence
and circulation, particularly the translation, adaptation,
appropriation and cultural reciprocation of his oeuvre. A Nobel
Prize winner who published and self-translated in both French and
English across literary genres, Beckett is recognized on a global
scale as a preeminent author and dramatist of the 20th century.
Samuel Beckett as World Literature brings together a wide range of
international contributors to share their perspectives on Beckett's
presence in countries such as China, Japan, Serbia, India and
Brazil, among others, and to flesh out Beckett's relationship with
postcolonial literatures and his place within the 'canon' of world
literature.
James Joyce's 1916 novella A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
is about the early manhood of Stephen Dedalus, later one of the
leading characters in Ulysses. Stephen's growing self-awareness as
an artist forces him to reject the whole narrow world in which he
has been brought up, including family ties, nationalism, and the
Catholic religion.
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.
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