This book shows just how closely late nineteenth-century American women's ghost stories engaged with objects such as photographs, mourning paraphernalia, wallpaper and humble domestic furniture. Featuring uncanny tales from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, it offers a new perspective on an old genre.

The English-speaking world today is so diverse that readers need a gateway to its many postcolonial narratives and art forms. This collection of essays examines this diversity and what brings so many different cultures together. Whether Indian, Canadian, Australasian or Zimbabwean, the stories discussed focus on how artists render experiences of separation, belonging, and loss. The histories and transformations postcolonial countries have gone through have given rise to a wide range of myths that retrace their birth, evolution, and decline. Myths have enabled ethnic communities to live together; the first section of this collection dwells on stories, which can be both inclusive and exclusive, under the aegis of 'nation'. While certain essays revisit and retell the crucial role women have played in mythical texts like the Mahabharata, others discuss how settler colonies return to and re-appropriate a past in order to define themselves in the present. Crises, clashes, and conflicts, which are at the heart of the second section of this book, entail myths of historical and cultural dislocation. They appear as breaks in time that call for reconstruction and redefinition, a chief instance being the trauma of slavery, with its deep geographical and cultural dislocations. However, the crises that have deprived entire communities of their homeland and their identity are followed by moments of remembrance, reconciliation, and rebuilding. As the term 'postcolonial' suggests, the formerly colonized people seek to revisit and re-investigate the impact of colonization before committing it to collective memory. In a more specifically literary section, texts are read as mythopoeia, foregrounding the aesthetic and poetic issues in colonial and postcolonial poems and novels. The texts explored here study in different ways the process of mythologization through images of location and dislocation. The editors of this collection hope that readers worldwide will enjoy reading about the myths that have shaped and continue to shape postcolonial communities and nations. CONTRIBUTORS Elara Bertho, Dunlaith Bird, Marie-Christine Blin, Jaine Chemmachery, Andre Dodeman, Biljana Doric Francuski, Frederic Dumas, Daniel Karlin, Sabine Lauret-Taft, Anne Le Guellec-Minel, Elodie Raimbault, Winfried Siemerling, Laura Singeot, Francoise Storey, Jeff Storey, Christine Vandamme

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Wail S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world. The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.

Beginning with Erich Auerbach's reflections on the Goethean concept of World Literature, Ottmar Ette unfolds the theory and practice of Literatures of the World. Today, only those literary theories that are oriented upon a history of movement are still capable of doing justice to the confusing diversity of highly dynamic, worldwide transformations. This is because they examine transareal pathways in the field of literature. This volume captures literary processes of exchange and transformation between the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific as well as the interplay of different ways of narrating space and time. Thus, this volume speaks from a fractal point of view and unfolds multiple perspectives. Literatures of the World allows the reader to think in different logical frameworks at the same time, therefore shaping our future on the basis of the diversity of humankind.

China's Literary Cosmopolitans offers a comprehensive introduction to the literary oeuvres of Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) and Yang Jiang (b. 1911). It assesses their novels, essays, stories, poetry, plays, translations, and criticism, and discusses their reception as two of the most important Chinese scholar-writers of the twentieth century. In addition to re-evaluating this married couple's intertwined literary careers, the book also explains why they have come to represent such influential models of Chinese literary cosmopolitanism. Uncommonly well-versed in Western languages and literatures, Qian and Yang chose to live in China and write in Chinese. China's Literary Cosmopolitans argues for their artistic importance while analyzing their works against the modern cultural imperative that Chinese literature be worldly. Christopher Rea (Ph.D., Columbia) is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015), co-editor of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900-65 (ubc Press, 2015), and editor of Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu(Columbia, 2011).

In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Max Brod’s posthumous papers which included a collection of Kafka’s manuscripts be transferred to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. If Kafka’s writings may be seen to belong to Jewish national culture and if they may be considered part of Israel’s heritage, then their analysis within a Jewish framework should be both viable and valuable. This volume is dedicated to the research of Franz Kafka’s late narrative “The Burrow� and its autobiographical and theological significance. Research is extended to incorporate many fields of study (architecture, sound studies, philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish studies, literary studies) to illustrate the dynamics at work within the text which reveal the Jewish aspects implicitly thematicized. Examination of the structure created, the nature of sound perceived, the atmosphere experienced and the acts performed by the protagonist serve as the foundation of this analysis and offer new access to Kafka’s work by presenting an interpretive, space-semantic approach. “Der Bau� is presented as a life concept given the task of constituting identity, highlighting the critical link between the literary and biographical Kafka and demonstrating the necessity of understanding the author as a Jewish writer to understand his late narrative. For her outstanding research project, Andrea Newsom Ebarb was awarded the “Forschungsförderpreis der Vereinigung der Freunde der Universität Mainz e.V.� in 2023.

The Destiny Grimoire Anthology is a must-have collectible lore compendium assembled for Destiny's devoted and enlightened scholars and lore lovers, as well as fans of fantasy and science fiction storytelling. The Destiny Grimoire Anthology weaves tales from multiple sources together for the first time, casting new light on Destiny's most legendary heroes, infamous villains, and their greatest moments of triumph and tragedy.

First published in 1897, H.G. Wells's alien invasion narrative The War of the Worlds was a landmark work of science fiction and one that continues to be adapted and referenced in the 21st century. Chronicling the novel's contexts, its origins and its many multi-media adaptations, this book is a complete biography of the life - and the afterlives - of The War of the Worlds. Exploring the original text's compelling sense of place and vivid recreation of Wells's Woking home and the concerns of fin-de-siecle Britain, the book goes on to chart the novel's immediate international impact. Starting with the initial serialisations in US newspapers, Peter Beck goes on to examine Orson Welles's legendary 1938 radio adaptation, TV and film adaptations from George Pal to Steven Spielberg, Jeff Wayne's rock opera and the numerous other works that have taken their inspiration from Wells's original. Drawing on new archival research, this is a comprehensive account of the continuing impact of The War of the Worlds.

At stake throughout the fictional writings of Marie NDiaye (1967-) is the issue of the stranger's welcome. NDiaye's fascination with a spectrum of outsider figures and with the multiple, often subtle practices which create and sustain social groups as bounded entities, gives rise to detailed and disquieting portrayals not of hospitality but of the mechanisms and rituals of repulsion. Engaging with critical theory on hospitality across the disciplines, Shirley Jordan's closely argued analysis of NDiaye's novels, theatre and short stories probes the tropes of inhospitality around which the writer's work coalesces, exploring the ethical significance of a corpus in which communities, environments and spaces are persistently tainted by unwelcoming. NDiaye is seen to elaborate a fantastic anthropology: one which, through sustained attentiveness to non-observance of the rules of hospitality, provides a focus for debate about belonging in a postcolonial world.

At a time in which many in the United States see Spanish America as a distinct and, for some, threatening culture clearly differentiated from that of Europe and the US, it may be of use to look at the works of some of the most representative and celebrated writers from the region to see how they imagined their relationship to Western culture and literature. In fact, while authors across stylistic and political divides-like Gabriela Mistral, Jorge Luis Borges, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez-see their work as being framed within the confines of a globalized Western literary tradition, their relationship, rather than epigonal, is often subversive. Borges and Kafka, Bolano and Bloom is a parsing not simply of these authors' reactions to a canon, but of the notion of canon writ large and the inequities and erasures therein. It concludes with a look at the testimonial and autobiographical writings of Rigoberta Menchu and Lurgio Gavilan, who arguably represent the trajectory of Indigenous testimonial and autobiographical writing during the last forty years, noting how their texts represent alternative ways of relating to national and, on occasion, Western cultures. This study is a new attempt to map writers' diverse ways of thinking about locality and universality from within and without what is known as the canon.

This study of five towering Philip Roth novels - "Operation Shylock," the "American Pastoral "trilogy, and "The Plot Against America "- explores his vision of a turbulent post-war America personified in trial-racked Jewish American men. These works collectively register the impact of post-1945 upheavals upon the nation and American trial-based myths about wholesomeness and regeneration. Roth shows how the "stories of old" which moulded American self-making have produced disorderly and disruptive counter-stories, playing themselves out in Jewish men marked by spots and stains where their constitutional integrity has been infringed. Roth probes the nation's own constitutional testing points as he shatters the identities of characters such as fallen ace athlete Swede Levov and disgraced academic Coleman Silk. His books seek to strip away America's false innocence, demanding that historical accountability should replace myths of new beginnings. Creating arenas of trial for his American men where national discourses and narratives cross and clash, Roth's novels reveal that a culture equals its debates and allow us to see Americans and America as ongoing experiments, always being tested.

George R.R. Martin's acclaimed seven-book fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire is unique for its strong and multi-faceted female protagonists, from teen queen Daenerys, scheming Queen Cersei, child avenger Arya, knight Brienne, Red Witch Melisandre, and many more. The Game of Thrones universe challenges, exploits, yet also changes how we think of women and gender, not only in fantasy, but in Western culture in general. Divided into three sections addressing questions of adaptation from novel to television, female characters, and politics and female audience engagement within the GoT universe, the interdisciplinary and international lineup of contributors analyze gender in relation to female characters and topics such as genre, sex, violence, adaptation, as well as fan reviews. The genre of fantasy was once considered a primarily male territory with male heroes. Women of Ice and Fire shows how the GoT universe challenges, exploits, and reimagines gender and why it holds strong appeal to female readers, audiences, and online participants.

Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth argues that Roth's novels teach us that Jewish anxiety stems not only from fear of victimization but also from fear of perpetration. It is impossible to think about Jewish victimization without thinking about the Holocaust; and it is impossible to think about the taboo question of Jewish perpetration without thinking about Israel. Roth's texts explore the Israel-Palestine question and the Holocaust with varying degrees of intensity but all his novels scrutinize perpetration and victimization through examining racism and sexism in America. Brett Ashley Kaplan uses Roth's novels as springboards to illuminate larger problems of victimization and perpetration; masculinity, femininity, and gender; racism and anti-Semitism. For if, as Kaplan argues, Jewish anxiety is not only about the fear of oppression, and we can begin to see how these anxieties function in terms of fears of perpetration, then perhaps we can begin to unpack the complicated dynamics around the line between the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine.

This issue of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui collects a range of essays reflecting the diversity of Beckett Studies, many of which were presented at the conference in Reading to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Beckett International Foundation. Contributors are: Jonathan Bignell, Edward Bizub, Maria Jose Carrera, Conor Carville, Amanda Dennis, Peter Fifield, Lasse Gammelgaard, Scott Eric Hamilton, Tim Lawrence, Georgina Nugent-Folan, John Pilling, Siobhan Purcell, Rodney Sharkey, Paul Stewart, Rhys Tranter, Pim Verhulst.

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop your analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to track your learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping you to succeed.

This study proposes that - rather than trying to discern the normative value of Afropolitanism as an identificatory concept, politics, ethics or aesthetics - Afropolitanism may be best approached as a distinct historical and cultural moment, that is, a certain historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa, as signifier, as real and imagined locus, embodies in the globalized, yet predominantly Western, cultural landscape of the 21st century. As such, Making Black History looks at contemporary fictions of the African or Black Diaspora that have been written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism. Discursively, this moment is very much part of a diasporic conversation that takes place in the US and is thus informed by various negotiations of blackness, race, class, and cultural identity. Yet rather than interpreting Afropolitan literatures (merely) as a rejection of racial solidarity, as some commentators have, they should be read as ambivalent responses to post-racial discourses dominating the first decade of the 21st century, particularly in the US, which oscillate between moments of intense hope and acute disappointment. Please read our interview with Dominique Haensell here: https://blog.degruyter.com/de-gruyters-10th-open-access-book-anniversary-dominique-haensell-and-her-winning-title-making-black-history/

Ecce Homo: A Survey in the Life and Work of Jesus Christ, published anonymously in 1865, alarmed some readers and delighted others by its presentation of a humanitarian view of Christ and early Christian history. Victorian Jesus explores the relationship between historian J. R. Seeley and his publisher Alexander Macmillan as they sought to keep Seeley's authorship a secret while also trying to exploit the public interest. Ian Hesketh highlights how Ecce Homo's reception encapsulates how Victorians came to terms with rapidly changing religious views in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hesketh critically examines Seeley's career and public image, and the publication and reception of his controversial work. Readers and commentators sought to discover the author's identity in order to uncover the hidden meaning of the book, and this engendered a lively debate about the ethics of anonymous publishing. In Victorian Jesus, Ian Hesketh argues for the centrality of this moment in the history of anonymity in book and periodical publishing throughout the century.

Emphasizing the role of and portrayal of emotion, this study argues for the inclusion of six late-eighteenth-century German-language novels by and about women in a revised canon. Literature written by women in German during the "Age of Goethe" was largely considered unworthy Trivialliteratur. Using insights from Gender Studies yet acknowledging the need for a literary canon, Great Books by German Women offers a critical interpretation of six canon-worthy German novels written by women in the period, which it calls the "Age of Emotion." The novels are chosen because they depict women's ordinary yet interesting lives and because each contains prose particularly expressive of emotion. Sophie von La Roche's Die Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim draws on the tradition of the epistolary novel while finding new ways to depict empathetic emotions. Friederike Unger's Julchen Grunthal brings to the Frauenroman or women's novel the use of irony to portray a heroine's emotions during her coming of age. Sophie Mereau's Blutenalter der Empfindung imagines women's affinity for the philosophical sublime, while Caroline Wolzogen depicts female desire in her Agnes von Lilien: both add lyricism to their prose, capturing sensual emotions. Karoline Fischer's Die Honigmonathe explores the agony that extreme emotions cause - not only for women but for men. And Caroline Pichler's Frauenwurde expands the focus from a young heroine to multiple mature characters. This study concludes that the influence of these six works was in no way trivial, either in portraying women's lives and emotions or in the history of German literature.

Volume of new essays investigating Kleist's influences and sources both literary and philosophical, their role as paradigms, and the ways in which he responded to and often shattered them. Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a rebel who upset canonization by employing his predecessors and contemporaries as what Steven Howe calls "inspirational foils." It was precisely a keen awareness of literary and philosophical traditions that allowed Kleist to shatter prevailing paradigms. Though little is known about what specifically Kleist read, the frequent allusions in his enduringly modern oeuvre indicate fruitful dialogues with both canonical and marginal works of European literature, spanning antiquity (The Old Testament, Sophocles), the Early Modern Period (Shakespeare, De Zayas), the late Enlightenment (Wieland, Goethe, Schiller), and the first eleven years of the nineteenth century (Mereau, Brentano, Collin). Kleist's works also evidence encounters with his philosophical precursors and contemporaries, including the ancient Greeks (Aristotle) and representatives of all phases of Enlightenment thought (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Ferguson, Spalding, Fichte, Kant, Hegel), economic theories (Smith, Kraus), and developments in anthropology, sociology, and law. This volume of new essays sheds light on Kleist's relationship to his literary and philosophical influences and on their function as paradigms to which his writings respond.

"Every page brings forth the elegiac tone of JRR Tolkien's work... It is a beautiful book, including many wonderful pictures by Tolkien himself... Garth's book made me realise the impact that Tolkien has had on my life." The Times A lavishly illustrated exploration of the places that inspired and shaped the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of Middle-earth. This new book from renowned expert John Garth takes us to the places that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to create his fictional locations in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and other classic works. Featuring more than 100 images, it includes Tolkien's own illustrations, contributions from other artists, archive images, maps and spectacular present-day photographs. Inspirational locations range across Great Britain - particularly Tolkien's beloved West Midlands and Oxford - but also overseas to all points of the compass. Sources are located for Hobbiton, the elven valley of Rivendell, the Glittering Caves of Helm's Deep, and many other key spots in Middle-earth, as well as for its mountain scenery, forests, rivers, lakes and shorelands. A rich interplay is revealed between Tolkien's personal travels, his wide reading and his deep scholarship as an Oxford professor. Garth uses his own profound knowledge of Tolkien's life and work to uncover the extraordinary processes of invention, to debunk popular misconceptions about the inspirations for Middle-earth, and to put forward strong new claims of his own. Organised by theme, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien is an illustrated journey into the life and imagination of one of the world's best-loved authors, an exploration of the relationship between worlds real and fantastical, and an inspiration for anyone who wants to follow in Tolkien's footsteps.

John Ruskin's training as an interdisciplinary polymath started in childhood. He learned to memorise the Bible at his mother's knee and published his first poem aged ten. His lifelong fascination with geology found its earliest expression in journal articles from the age of fifteen, while his considerable talents as a draughtsman were developed by leading drawing masters before he was sixteen. Rather than being a prodigy in one particular field, it was his precocious mix of religion, science and art that laid the foundations for the fulfilment of his career as a critic of art, architecture and society. The cultural tours that he made with his family as he grew up provided the crucial focus for these developing interests, and the second extended tour of the Continent in 1835 at the age of sixteen in particular established the paradigm for his orchestrated representation and analysis of cultural experience along 'the old road', through France to Chamonix, and through the Swiss Alps to northern Italy as far as Venice. His diary of the journey and associated writings, together with the numerous drawings he made in relation to it, are annotated and fully catalogued for the first time in this edition that includes maps and an introductory essay. Keith Hanley is Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. Caroline S. Hull is a freelance academic writer and researcher.

Thomas Mann arrived in Princeton in 1938, in exile from Nazi Germany, and feted in his new country as "the greatest living man of letters." This beautiful new book from literary critic Stanley Corngold tells the little known story of Mann's early years in America and his encounters with a group of highly gifted emigres in Princeton, which came to be called the Kahler Circle, with Mann at its center. The Circle included immensely creative, mostly German-speaking exiles from Nazism, foremost Mann, Erich Kahler, Hermann Broch, and Albert Einstein, all of whom, during the Circle's nascent years in Princeton, were "stupendously" productive. In clear, engaging prose, Corngold explores the traces the Circle left behind during Mann's stay in Princeton, treating literary works and political statements, anecdotes, contemporary history, and the Circle's afterlife. Weimar in Princeton portrays a fascinating scene of cultural production, at a critical juncture in the 20th century, and the experiences of an extraordinary group of writers and thinkers who gathered together to mourn a lost culture and to reckon with the new world in which they had arrived.