The malaise of melancholia has a long tradition in literature, theory, and the visual arts, from Durer's famous sixteenth-century engraving (Melencolia I) and Milton's "Il Penseroso," to Walter Benjamin's Arcades and Lars Von Triers' recent film Melancholia. Sanja Bahun's monograph uses the mental condition as a jumping-off point to advance new approaches to modernist novelists from around Russia, the Czech Republic, and Britain. Informed by the writings of Freud, Klein, Judith Butler, and others, Bahun argues that formal explorations by modernist authors are best interpreted as narratives of historical melancholia. Specifically, Modernism and Melancholia shows how a range of novels from 1913 to 1941 perform melancholia in their diction, images, metaphors, syntax, and experimental narrative techniques. Drawing on the narrative theorist, Bakhtin, Bahun applies the term chronotope to link all these formal characteristics to a historical moment bounded by two world wars, the loss of stable identities, and the rise of racism and totalitarianism. Melancholic symptoms, once they become performative, create a modernist relationship to history that becomes both passionately engaged and curiously withdrawn. The three core novels at the heart of the study are Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Franz Kafka's The Castle, and Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. Modernism and Melancholia adds an important transnational perspective to modernist studies and comparative literature more broadly.

The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels, that is texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial construction is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.

One of the nineteenth century's most successful and most frequently revived plays, An Ideal Husband has divided critics more than any other of Wilde's plays. Treating political intrigue, financial fraud, blackmail, scandal and spin, and the role of women in public life, it is a play which engaged with issues of vital importance to its late-Victorian audience, which continue to resonate today. Sos Eltis, a specialist in Victorian drama and its relation to women's issues, provides a stimulating new perspective on An Ideal Husband, through an introduction that looks at its relation with contemporary social purity campaigns, women's rights, and political scandals. The introduction also gives a substantial performance history, with particular reference to the play's film versions and the influential Peter Hall theatre production.

The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. While the young studio system worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders wrote fiction to fill in what newspapers and fan magazines left out. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these novels aimed to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. As likeminded filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s gradually brought the dark side of the industry to the screen, however, the Hollywood novel found itself struggling to live up to its original promise of delivering the unfilmable. By the 1960s, desperate to remain relevant, the genre had devolved into little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors, perhaps the only thing the public couldn't already find elsewhere. Still, given their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these earlier works offer a window into the industry's dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination.

Linguistic Rivalries weaves together anthropological accounts of diaspora, nation, and empire to explore and analyze the multi-faceted processes of globalization characterizing the migration and social integration experiences of Tamil-speaking immigrants and refugees from India and Sri Lanka to Montreal, Quebec in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Montreal, a city with more trilingual speakers than in any other North American city, Tamil migrants draw on their multilingual repertoires to navigate longstanding linguistic rivalries between anglophone and francophone, and Indian and Sri Lankan nationalist leaders by arguing that Indians speak "Spoken Tamil " and Sri Lankans speak "Written Tamil " as their respective heritage languages. Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and linguistic methods to compare and contrast the communicative practices and language ideologies of Tamil heritage language learning in Hindu temples, Catholic churches, public schools, and community centers, this book demonstrates how processes of sociolinguistic differentiation are mediated by ethnonational, religious, class, racial, and caste hierarchies. Indian Tamils showcase their use of the "cosmopolitan " sounds and scripts of colloquial varieties of Tamil to enhance their geographic and social mobilities, whereas Sri Lankan Tamils, dispossessed of their homes by civil war, instead emphasize the "primordialist " sounds and scripts of a pure "literary " Tamil to rebuild their homeland and launch a "global " critique of racism and environmental destruction from the diaspora. This book uses the ethnographic and archival study of Tamil mobility and immobility to expose the mutual constitution of elite and non-elite global modernities, defined as language ideological projects in which migrants objectify dimensions of time and space through scalar metaphors.

The greed, excess, and decadence of the long 1980s has been famously chronicled, critiqued, and satirized in epochal works like White Noise by Don DeLillo, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. Leigh Claire La Berge offers an in-depth study of these fictions alongside the key moments of financial history that inform them, contending that throughout the 1980s, novelists, journalists, and filmmakers began to reimagine the capitalist economy as one that was newly personal, masculine, and anxiety producing. The study's first half links the linguistic to the technological by exploring the arrival of ATMs and their ubiquity in postmodern American literature. In transformative readings of novels such as White Noise and American Psycho, La Berge traces how the ATM serves as a symbol of anxious isolation and the erosion of interpersonal communication. A subsequent chapter on Ellis' novel and Jane Smiley's Good Faith explores how male protagonists in each develop unique associations between money and masculinity. The second half of the monograph features chapters that attend to works-most notably Oliver Stone's Wall Street and Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities-that capture aspects of the arrogance and recklessness that led to the savings-and-loan crisis and the 1987 stock market crash. Concluding with a coda on the recent Occupy Wall Street Movement and four short stories written in its wake, Scandals and Abstraction demonstrates how economic forces continue to remain a powerful presence in today's fiction.

America is Elsewhere provides a rigorous and creative reconsideration of hard-boiled crime fiction and the film noir tradition within three related postwar contexts: 1) the rise of the consumer republic in the United States after World War II 2) the challenge to traditional notions of masculinity posed by a new form of citizenship based in consumption, and 3) the simultaneous creation of "authenticity effects" - representational strategies designed to safeguard an image of both the American male and America itself outside of and in opposition to the increasingly omnipresent marketplace. Films like Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole, and Kiss Me Deadly alongside novels by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler provide rich examples for the first half of the study. The second is largely devoted to works less commonly understood in relation to the hard-boiled and noir canon. Examinations of the conspiracy films from the Seventies and Eighties-like Klute and The Parallax View-novels by Thomas Pynchon, Chester Himes and William Gibson reveal the persistence and evolution of these authenticity effects across the second half of the American twentieth century.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

Taking its title from Faulkner's epochal modernist novel, David Sherman's study traces the myriad ways death and its effect on the living defined modernist fiction and verse in England, Ireland, and the U.S. A focus on the disturbing but recurring image of the corpse allows Sherman to consider a range of texts marked by their sense of mortal fragility. Wilfred Owen's war poetry and Virginia Woolf's early novel Jacob's Room illustrate an incipient anxiety over new governmental techniques for efficiently managing the burial of the dead during World War I. Joyce's Ulysses and As I Lay Dying offer opportunities to consider narratives organized by the problem of an unburied corpse. Eliot's The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood, which Eliot edited, demonstrate how modernist writers often respond to death and the loss of corporality with erotic encounters at the moment mortality is most threatened. Two poems by William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, in the monograph's concluding section, provide emblems for competing attitudes toward the disposal of the dead in the first half of the twentieth century. Enriched by insights from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, In a Strange Room presents a richly textured transatlantic study of a defining aspect of modernist literature and culture.

'People say to me, if you could do it all again, knowing what you know now, would you change anything? I'm like, f*** no. If I'd been clean and sober, I wouldn't be Ozzy. If I'd done normal, sensible things, I wouldn't be Ozzy.'

Husband. Father. Grandfather. Icon.
1948 - 2025

At the age of sixty-nine, Ozzy Osbourne was on a triumphant farewell tour, playing to sold-out arenas and rave reviews all around the world.

Then: disaster.

In a matter of just a few weeks, he went from being hospitalised with a finger infection to having to abandon his tour - and all public life - as he faced near-total paralysis from the neck down.

Last Rites is the shocking, bitterly hilarious, never-before-told story of Ozzy's descent into hell. Along the way are reflections on an extraordinary life and career, including his marriage to wife Sharon, and what it took for him to return to the stage for the triumphant Back to the Beginning concert, streamed around the world, where Ozzy reunited with his Black Sabbath bandmates for the final time.

Unflinching, brutally honest, but surprisingly life-affirming, Last Rites demonstrates once again why Ozzy transcended his status as 'The Godfather of Metal' and 'The Prince of Darkness' to become a modern-day folk hero and national treasure.

Donald Davidson was one of the 20th Century's deepest analytic thinkers. He developed a systematic picture of the human mind and its relation to the world, an original and sustained vision that exerted a shaping influence well beyond analytic philosophy of mind and language. At its center is an idea of minded creatures as essentially rational animals: Rational animals can be interpreted, their behavior can be understood, and the contents of their thoughts are, in principle, open to others. The combination of a rigorous analytic stance with aspects of humanism so distinctive of Davidsonian thought finds its maybe most characteristic expression when this central idea is brought to bear on the relation of the mental to the physical: Davidson defended the irreducibility of its rational nature while acknowledging that the mental is ultimately determined by the physical.
Davidson made contributions of lasting importance to a wide range of topics -- from general theory of meaning and content over formal semantics, the theories of truth, explanation, and action, to metaphysics and epistemology. His writings almost entirely consist of short, elegant, and often witty papers. These dense and thematically tightly interwoven essays present a profound challenge to the reader.
This book provides a concise, systematic introduction to all the main elements of Davidson's philosophy. It places the theory of meaning and content at the very center of his thought. By using interpretation, and the interpreter, as key ideas it clearly brings out the underlying structure and unified nature of Davidson's work. Kathrin Gluer carefully outlines his principal claims and arguments, and discusses them in some detail. The book thus makes Davidson's thought accessible in its genuine depth, and acquaints the reader with the main lines of discussion surrounding it."

The Tenth Edition introduces diverse, compelling, relevant texts-from Civil War songs and stories to The Turn of the Screw to The Great Gatsby to poems by Juan Felipe Herrera and Claudia Rankine to a science fiction cluster featuring Octavia Butler and N. K. Jemisin. And continuing its course of innovative and market-responsive changes, the anthology now offers resources to help instructors meet today's teaching challenges. Chief among these resources is InQuizitive, Norton's award-winning learning tool, which includes interactive questions on the period introductions and often-taught works in the anthology. In addition, the Tenth Edition maintains the anthology's exceptional editorial apparatus and generous and diverse slate of texts overall. Available in print and as an annotatable ebook, the anthology is ideal for online, hybrid or in-person teaching.

Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, has a single destiny. When the King dies, he must commit ritual suicide and lead his King's favourite horse and dog through the passage to the world of the ancestors. A British Colonial Officer, Pilkings, intervenes to prevent the death and arrests Elesin. The play is a set text for NEAB GCSE, NEAB A Level and NEAB A/S Level. 'A masterpiece of 20th century drama' - Guardian "A transfixing work of modern world drama" (Independent); "clearly a masterpiece. . . he achieves the full impact of Greek tragedy" (Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday); "the action of the play is as inevitable and eloquent as in Antigone: a clash of values and cultures so fundamental that tragedy issues: a tragedy for each individual, each tribe" (Michael Schmidt, Daily Telegraph)

South African poet and political activist Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) wrote poetry of the most exquisite lyrical beauty and intense power. And through his various political activities, he played a uniquely significant role in mobilising and intensifying opposition to injustice and oppression - initially in South Africa, but later throughout the rest of the world as well. This book focuses on the life of Dennis Brutus in South Africa from his childhood until he went into exile on an exit permit in 1966. It is also an attempt to acknowledge Brutus' literary and political work and, in a sense, to reintroduce Brutus to South Africa. This book places his own voice at the centre of his life story. It is told primarily in his own words - through newspaper and journal articles, tape recordings, interviews, speeches, court records and correspondence. It draws extensively on archival material not yet available in the public domain, as well as on interviews with several people who interacted with Brutus during his early years in South Africa. In particular, it examines his participation in some of the most influential organisations of his time, including the Teachers' League of South Africa, the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department movement and the Coloured National Convention, the Co-ordinating Committee for International Recognition in Sport, the South African Sports Association and the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, which all campaigned against racism in South African sport. Brutus left behind an important legacy in literature involvement, in community affairs and politics in as well.

Imposters are third person DPs that are used to refer to the speaker/writer or addressee, such as : (i) Your humble servant finds the time before our next encounter very long. (ii) This reporter thinks that the current developments are extraordinary. (iii) Daddy will be back before too long. (iv) The present author finds the logic of the reply faulty. This volume explores verbal and pronominal agreement with imposters from a cross-linguistic perspective. The central questions for any given language are: (a) How do singular and plural imposters agree with the verb? (b) When a pronoun has an imposter antecedent, what are the phi-features of the pronoun? The volume reveals a remarkable degree of variation in the answers to these questions, but also reveals some underlying generalizations. The contributions describe imposters in Bangla, Spanish, Albanian, Indonesian, Italian, French, Romanian, Mandarin and Icelandic.

Writing the Rebellion presents a cultural history of loyalist writing in early America. There has been a spate of related works recently, but Philip Gould's narrative offers a completely different view of the loyalist/patriot contentions than appears in any of these accounts. By focusing on the literary projections of the loyalist cause, Gould dissolves the old legend that loyalists were more British than American, and patriots the embodiment of a new sensibility drawn from their American situation and upbringing. He shows that both sides claimed to be heritors of British civil discourse, Old World learning, and the genius of English culture. The first half of Writing Rebellion deals with the ways "political disputation spilled into arguments about style, form, and aesthetics, as though these subjects could secure (or ruin) the very status of political authorship." Chapters in this section illustrate how loyalists attack patriot rhetoric by invoking British satires of an inflated Whig style by Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Another chapter turns to Loyalist critiques of Congressional language and especially the Continental Association, which was responsible for radical and increasingly violent measures against the Loyalists. The second half of Gould's book looks at satiric adaptations of the ancient ballad tradition to see what happens when patriots and loyalists interpret and adapt the same text (or texts) for distinctive yet related purposes. The last two chapters look at the Loyalist response to Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the ways the concept of the author became defined in early America. Throughout the manuscript, Gould acknowledges the purchase English literary culture continued to have in revolutionary America, even among revolutionaries.

In America, as in Britain, the Victorian era enjoyed a long life, stretching from the 1830s to the 1910s. It marked the transition from a pre-modern to a modern way of life. Ellen White's life (1827-1915) spanned those years and then some, but the last three months of a single year, 1844, served as the pivot for everything else. When the Lord failed to return on October 22, as she and other followers of William Miller had predicted, White did not lose heart. Fired by a vision she experienced, White played the principal role in transforming a remnant minority of Millerites into the sturdy sect that soon came to be known as the Seventh-day Adventists. She and a small group of fellow believers emphasized a Saturday Sabbath and an imminent Advent. Today that flourishing denomination posts twenty million adherents globally and one of the largest education, hospital, publishing, and missionary outreach programs in the world. Over the course of her life White generated 50,000 manuscript pages and letters, and produced 40 books that have enjoyed extremely wide circulation. She ranks as one of the most gifted and influential religious leaders in American history, and Ellen Harmon White tells her story in a new and remarkably informative way. Some of the contributors identify with the Adventist tradition, some with other Christian denominations, and some with no religious tradition at all. Taken together their essays call for White to be seen as a significant figure in American religious history and for her to be understood her within the context of her times.

Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War.

Early in his career, the composer Arnold Schoenberg maintained correspondence with many notable figures: Gustav Mahler, Heinrich Schenker, Guido Adler, Arnold Rose, Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Anton von Webern, to name a few. In this volume of Oxford's Schoenberg in Words series, Ethan Haimo and Sabine Feisst present English translations of the entirety of Arnold Schoenberg's early correspondence, from the earliest extant letters in 1891 to those written in the aftermath of the controversial premieres of his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7, and the Kammersymphonie, Op. 9. The letters provide a wealth of information on many of the crucial stages in Schoenberg's early career, offering invaluable insights into his daily life and working habits. New details emerge about his activities at Wolzogen's Buntes Theater in Berlin, his frequently confrontational interactions with his first publisher (Dreililien Verlag), the reactions of friends and critics to the premieres of his works, his role in the founding of the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkunstler, his activities as a teacher, and his (all too often unsuccessful) attempts to convince musicians to perform his music. Presented alongside the editors' extensive running commentary, the more than 300 letters in this volume create a vivid picture of the young Schoenberg and his times.

The Language of Murder Cases describes fifteen court cases for which Roger Shuy served as an expert language witness, and explains the issues at stake in those cases for lawyers and linguists. Investigations and trials in murder cases are guided by the important legal terms describing the mental states of defendants-their intentionality, predisposition, and voluntariness. Unfortunately, statutes and dictionaries can provide only loose definitions of these terms, largely because mental states are virtually impossible to define. Their meaning, therefore, must be adduced either by inferences and assumptions, or by any available language evidence-which is often the best window into a speaker's mind. Fortunately, this window of evidence exists primarily in electronically recorded undercover conversations, police interviews, and legal hearings and trials, all of which are subject to linguistic analysis during trial. This book examines how vague legal terminology can be clarified by analysis of the language used by suspects, defendants, law enforcement officers, and attorneys. Shuy examines speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, conversational strategies, and smaller language units such as syntax, lexicon, and phonology, and discusses how these examinations can play a major role in deciding murder cases. After defining key terms common in murder investigations, Shuy describes fifteen fascinating cases, analyzing the role that language played in each. He concludes with a summary of how his analyses were regarded by the juries as they struggled with the equally vague concept of reasonable doubt.