As a concept, 'trauma' has attracted a great deal of interest in literary studies. A key term in psychoanalytic approaches to literary study, trauma theory represents a critical approach that enables new modes of reading and of listening. It is a leading concept of our time, applicable to individuals, cultures, and nations. This book traces how trauma theory has come to constitute a discrete but influential approach within literary criticism in recent decades. It offers an overview of the genesis and growth of literary trauma theory, recording the evolution of the concept of trauma in relation to literary studies. In twenty-one essays, covering the origins, development, and applications of trauma in literary studies, Trauma and Literature addresses the relevance and impact this concept has in the field.

Anne Spencer between Worlds provides an indispensable reassessment of a critically neglected figure. Looking beyond the poetry she published during the Harlem Renaissance, Noelle Morrissette provides a new critical lens for interpreting Spencer's expansive life and imagination through her archives, giving particular focus to her manuscripts authored from 1940 to 1975. Through its attentiveness to Spencer's published and unpublished work, her work as a librarian and an activist, and the political dimensions of her writing, Anne Spencer between Worlds transforms our understanding of Spencer. It offers a sustained examination of poetry and ecology, and the relationships among race, gender, and archives, through its analysis of the manuscripts that Spencer produced and revised throughout her life. Morrissette argues that the expansiveness, depth, and range of Spencer's writing has not been appreciated because she did not publish this incomplete, ongoing work. She also demonstrates that careful reading of the manuscripts challenges many of the assumptions that have governed Spencer's reception. In Anne Spencer between Worlds, Spencer emerges as a deeply engaged political poet who used the creative possibilities of the unpublished manuscript to explore pressing political and cultural concerns and to develop experimental cultural forms. In her unpublished manuscripts, Spencer pushed beyond the lyric mode to develop experimental forms that were alert to the expressive possibilities of the epic, prose, correspondence, and mixed genres. Indeed, Spencer's manuscripts serve as witnesses of historical and poetic junctions for the poet and for the attentive reader of her archives.

In Unveiling Desire, Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow show that the duality of the fallen/saved woman is as prevalent in Eastern culture as it is in the West, specifically in literature and films. Using examples from the Middle to Far East, including Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Japan, and China, this anthology challenges the fascination with Eastern women as passive, abject, or sexually exotic, but also resists the temptation to then focus on the veil, geisha, sati, or Muslim women's oppression without exploring Eastern women's sexuality beyond these contexts. The chapters cover instead mind/body sexual politics, patriarchal cultural constructs, the anatomy of sex and power in relation to myth and culture, denigration of female anatomy, and gender performativity. From Persepolis to Bollywood, and from fairy tales to crime fiction, the contributors to Unveiling Desire show how the struggle for women's liberation is truly global.

Law and Literature presents an authoritative, fresh and accessible new overview of the many ways in which law and literature interact. Written by a team of international experts, it provides a multi-focused history of literary studies' critical interest in ideas of law and justice. It examines the effects of law on writers and their work, ranging from classical tragedy to comics, and from East Africa to Elizabethan England. Over twenty chapters, contributors reveal the intricate and multivalent historical interactions between law and literature, both past and present, and trace the intellectual genesis of the concept of law in literary studies, focusing on major developments in the history of the interdisciplinary project of law and literature, as well as the changing ideas of law, and the cultural contests in which it has figured. Law and Literature will appeal to graduates and scholars working on the intersection between law and literature and in key related areas such as literature and human rights.

Dante's Convivio, composed in exile between 1304 and 1307, is a series of self-commentaries on three of Dante's long poems. These allegorical love poems and philosophical verse become the basis for philosophical, literary, moral, and political exposition. The prose is written in Italian so that those who were not educated in Latin could take part in what Dante called his 'banquet of knowledge'. In this edition, eminent Dante translator-scholar Andrew Frisardi offers the first fully annotated translation of the work into English, with an extensive introduction, making Dante's often complex writings accessible to scholars and students. The parallel Italian text is also included for the first time in an English translation of the Convivio. Readers of this work can gain a strong understanding of the philosophical themes across Dante's work, including the Divine Comedy, as well as the logic, politics and science of his time.

Provides a comprehensive and original guide to Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and other writing, including literary criticism and prose fiction.

Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of America. As Twain understood, The Mississippi is well worth reading about. Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the antebellum imagination, exploring its cultural position in literature, art, thought, and national life. Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images that evolved as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. He examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery. Smith discusses the growing importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the antebellum period progressed, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature. From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.

The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets offers a fascinating introduction to Irish poetry from the seventeenth century to the present. Aimed primarily at lovers of poetry, it examines a wide range of poets, including household names, such as Jonathan Swift, Thomas Moore, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon. The book is comprised of thirty chapters written by critics, leading scholars and poets, who bring an authoritative and accessible understanding to their subjects. Each chapter gives an overview of a poet's work and guides the general reader through the wider cultural, historical and comparative contexts. Exploring the dual traditions of English and Irish-speaking poets, this Companion represents the very best of Irish poetry and highlights understanding that reveals, in clear and accessible prose, the achievement of Irish poetry in a global context. It is a book that will help and guide general readers through the many achievements of Irish poets.

There are thousands of books that represent the Holocaust, but can, and should, the act of reading these works convey the events of genocide to those who did not experience it? In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself is a barrier between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts-and that this barrier is not a lack of substance, but a defining characteristic of the genre. Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of "textual silence" is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader's analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader's ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.

Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell maintained lifelong, wellA -documented friendships with one another, often discussing each other's work in private correspondence and published reviews. Joan Romano Shifflett's Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry traces the artistic and personal connections between the three writers. Her study uncovers the significance of their parallel literary development and reevaluates dominant views of how American poetry evolved during the midA -twentieth century. Familiar accounts of literary history, most prominently the celebration of Lowell's Life Studies as a revolutionary breakthrough into confessional poetry, have obscured the significance of the deep connections that Lowell shared with Warren and Jarrell. They all became quite close in the 1930s, with the content and style of their early poetry revealing the impact of their mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose aesthetics the three would ultimately modify and transform. The three poets achieved professional maturity and success in the 1940s, during which time they relied on one another's honest critiques as they experimented with changes in subject matter and modes of expression. Shifflett shows that their works of the late 1940s were heavily influenced by Robert Frost. This period found Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell infusing ostensibly simple verse with multifaceted layers of meaning, capturing the language of speech in diction and rhythm, and striving to raise human experience to a universal level. During the 1950s, the three poets became public figures, producing major works that addressed the nation's postwar need to reconnect with humanity. Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell continued to respond in interlocking ways throughout the 1960s, with each writer using innovative stylistic techniques to create a colloquy with readers that directed attention away from superficial matters and toward the important work of selfA -reflection. Drawing from biographical materials and correspondence, along with detailed readings of many poems, Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell offers a compelling new perspective on the shaping of twentieth-A century American poetry.

This is an expansion of the first dictionary of symbols to be based on literature, rather than on 'universal' psychological archetypes or myths. It explains and illustrates the literary symbols that we frequently encounter (such as swan, rose, moon, gold) and gives thousands of cross-references and quotations. The dictionary concentrates on English literature, but its entries range widely from the Bible and classical authors to the twentieth century, taking in American and European literatures. For this third edition, Michael Ferber has included some twenty completely new entries (such as birch, childbirth, grove, mill and railroad) and has added to many of the existing entries. Its rich references make this book an essential tool not only for literary and classical scholars but also for all students of literature.

'Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are'. This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein's erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honore de Balzac's writings. It is not a coincidence that Balzac was the first in French literature to tackle this appetizing topic. Before the French Revolution, a traveller in France was apt to find local food scarce, tasteless, and of doubtful appearance. Restaurants did not even exist! Just as the art of the table became a centrepiece of French mores, Balzac used it as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing. Full of surprise and insights, "Balzac's Omelette" invites you to taste a new French literature and cuisine.

The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking rights seriously has never been more urgent. The eighteen essays which comprise Literature and Human Rights are written as a contribution to this vital debate. Each moreover is written in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, reaching across the myriad constitutive disciplines of law, literature and the humanities in order to present an array of alternative perspectives on the nature and meaning of human rights in the modern world. The taking of human rights seriously, it will be suggested, depends just as much on taking seriously the idea of the human as it does the idea of rights.

This book is about Susan Howe's poetry from the perspective of space. Howe reshapes cultural configurations of space through her drive to infiltrate interstitial areas of 'third' spaces: the silences of history, the margins of the page, the placeless migrants, and the uncharted lands. Nuances, frontiers, thresholds, edges, fuzzinesses, ambiguities, pauses, singularities, margins: these are the spaces where her poetry occurs, places that lie between two states. Rather than absences, therefore, the space of this poetry is a place of being, of what Gilles Deleuze and FZlix Guattari refer to as becoming. Third space is contested because it must also call itself into question in reimagining itself; in questioning its condition and rethinking itself, it contradicts itself repeatedly, setting up the form of an ever-present yet ever-shifting paradox of self-presencing. This site is also, however, the place of no frames or boundaries, a place that is all margins and singularities, that site of displacement, where migration is eternal and violence is perennial. Nomadism becomes an emblem in Howe's poetry for the twentieth-century condition as it represents the continual movement through space of the body, that never-ending, always-perpetuated sense of loss of place, but that equally charged coming into being regardless of the space within which that loss/becoming occurs.

Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts. Since its founding in 2011, LARB has quickly established itself as a thriving institution for writers and readers. TheLARB Quarterly Journal, a signature print edition, reflects the best that this institution brings to a national and international readership. The print magazine cultivates a stable of regular and ongoing contributors, both eminent and emerging, to cover all topics and genres, from politics to fiction, film to poetry, and much more.LARB specializes in a looser and more eclectic approach than other journals: grounded in literature but open to all varieties of cultural experience. Headquartered in Los Angeles, but home to writers and artists from all over the world, theLARB Quarterly Journal brings the pioneering spirit of the online magazine into print and and remains committed to covering and representing today's diverse literary and cultural landscape.

Well known for his contrarianism and solitude, Henry David Thoreau was nonetheless deeply responsive to the world around him. His writings bear the traces of his wide-ranging reading, travels, political interests, and social influences. Henry David Thoreau in Context brings together leading scholars of Thoreau and nineteenth-century American literature and culture and presents original research, valuable synthesis of historical and scholarly sources, and innovative readings of Thoreau's texts. Across thirty-four chapters, this collection reveals a Thoreau deeply concerned with and shaped by a diverse range of environments, intellectual traditions, social issues, and modes of scientific practice. Essays also illuminate important posthumous contexts and consider the specific challenges of contextualizing Thoreau today. This collection provides a rich understanding of Thoreau and nineteenth-century American literature, political activism, and environmentalist thinking that will be a vital resource for students, teachers, scholars, and general readers.

Saul Bellow is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American literature. Bellow's work explores the most important cultural and social experiences of his era: the impact of the Holocaust, the urban experience of European immigrants from a Jewish perspective, the fraught failures of the Vietnam War, the ideological seductions of Marxism and Modernism, and the changing attitudes concerning gender and race. This Companion demonstrates the complexity of this formative writer by emphasizing the ways in which Bellow's works speak to the changing conditions of American identity and culture from the post-war period to the turn of the twenty-first century. Individual chapters address the major themes of Bellow's work over more than a half-century of masterfully crafted fiction, articulating some of the most significant cultural experiences of the American twentieth century. It provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of a key figure in American literature.

Dublin: Renaissance city of literature interrogates the notion of a literary 'renaissance' in Dublin. Through detailed case studies of print and literature in Renaissance Dublin, the volume covers innovative new ground, including quantitative analysis of print production in Ireland, unique insight into the city's literary communities and considerations of literary genres that flourished in early modern Dublin. The volume's broad focus and extended timeline offer an unprecedented and comprehensive consideration of the features of renaissance that may be traced to the city from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. With contributions from leading scholars in the area of early modern Ireland, including Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield, students and academics will find the book an invaluable resource for fully appreciating those elements that contributed to the complex literary character of Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature. -- .

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats offers an in-depth overview of one of the most innovative and popular literary periods in America, the Beat era. The Beats were a literary and cultural phenomenon originating in New York City in the 1940s that reached worldwide significance. Although its most well-known figures are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the Beat movement radiates out to encompass a rich diversity of figures and texts that merit further study. Consummate innovators, the Beats had a profound effect not only on the direction of American literature, but also on models of socio-political critique that would become more widespread in the 1960s and beyond. Bringing together the most influential Beat scholars writing today, this Companion provides a comprehensive exploration of the Beat movement, asking critical questions about its associated figures and arguing for their importance to postwar American letters.

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats offers an in-depth overview of one of the most innovative and popular literary periods in America, the Beat era. The Beats were a literary and cultural phenomenon originating in New York City in the 1940s that reached worldwide significance. Although its most well-known figures are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the Beat movement radiates out to encompass a rich diversity of figures and texts that merit further study. Consummate innovators, the Beats had a profound effect not only on the direction of American literature, but also on models of socio-political critique that would become more widespread in the 1960s and beyond. Bringing together the most influential Beat scholars writing today, this Companion provides a comprehensive exploration of the Beat movement, asking critical questions about its associated figures and arguing for their importance to postwar American letters.

Nineteenth-century European representations of Africa are notorious for depicting the continent with a blank interior. But there was a time when British writers filled Africa with landed empires and contiguous trade routes linked together by a network of rivers. This geographical narrative proliferated in fictional and nonfictional texts alike, and it was born not from fanciful speculation but from British interpretations of what Africans said and showed about themselves and their worlds. Investigations of the representation of Africa in British texts have typically concluded that the continent operated in the British imagination as a completely invented space with no meaningful connection to actual African worlds, or as an inert realm onto which writers projected their expansionist fantasies. With African Impressions, Rebekah Mitsein revises that narrative, demonstrating that African elites successfully projected expressions of their sovereignty, wealth, right to power, geopolitical clout, and religious exceptionalism into Europe long before Europeans entered sub-Saharan Africa. Mitsein considers the ways that African self-representation continued to drive European impressions of the continent across the early Enlightenment, fueling desires to find the sources of West Africa's gold and the city states along the Niger, to establish a relationship with the Christian kingdom of Prester John, and to discover the source of the Nile. Through an analysis of a range of genres, including travel narratives, geography books, maps, verse, and fiction, Mitsein shows how African strategies of self-representation and European strategies for representing Africa grew increasingly inextricable, as the ideas that Africans presented about themselves and their worlds migrated from contact zones to texts and back again. The geographical narratives that arose from this cycle, which unfolded over hundreds of years, were made to fit expansionist agendas, but they remained rooted in the African worlds and worldviews that shaped them.

This comprehensive collection of Italian tales in English encourages a revisitation of the fairy-tale canon in light of some of the most fascinating material that has often been excluded from it. In the United States, we tend to associate fairy tales with children and are most familiar with the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Disney. But the first literary fairy tales appeared in Renaissance Italy, and long before the Grimms there was already a rich and sophisticated tradition that included hundreds of tales, including many of those today considered "classic." The authors featured in this volume have, over the centuries, explored and interrogated the intersections between elite and popular cultures and oral and literary narratives, just as they have investigated the ways in which fairy tales have been and continue to be rewritten as expressions of both collective identities and individual sensibilities. The fairy tale in its Italian incarnations provides a striking example of how this genre is a potent vehicle for expressing cultural aspirations and anxieties as well as for imagining different ways of narrating shared futures.

In recent decades, the international recognition of Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez has placed Colombian writing on the global literary map. A History of Colombian Literature explores the genealogy of Colombian poetry and prose from the colonial period to the present day. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction that charts the development of a national literary tradition, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of Colombian literature. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse and fiction of such diverse writers as Jose Eustacio Rivera, Tomas Carrasquilla, Alvaro Mutis, and Dario Jaramillo Agudelo. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism and multiculturalism in Colombian literature. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Colombian writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

A forgotten historical figure and his influence on the writing of James Joyce In this book, Neil Davison argues that Albert Altman (1853-1903), Dublin-based businessman and Irish nationalist, influenced James Joyce's creation of the character of Leopold Bloom as well as Ulysses broader themes surrounding race, nationalism, and empire. Using extensive archival research, Davison reveals parallels between the lives of Altman and Bloom, including how the experience of double marginalization which Altman felt as both a Jew in Ireland and an Irishman in the British Empire is a major idea explored in Joyce's work. Altman, successful salt and coal merchant, was involved in municipal politics ove issues of Home Rule and labour, and frequently appeared in the press over the two decades of Joyce's youth. His prominence, Davison shows, made him a familiar name in the Home Rule circles with which Joyce and his father most identified. The book concludes by tracing the influence of Altman's career on the Dubliners story Ivy Day in the Committee Room as well as throughout the whole of Ulysses. Through Altman's biography, Davison recovers a forgotten life story that illuminates Irish and Jewish identity and culture in Joyce's Dublin. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles.