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Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works > Literary reference works
`Probably the most compulsive text ever penned about what it means
to handle and possess a book' - Christopher de Hamel, author of
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts; `A real treasure trove for
book lovers' - Alexander McCall Smith; We love books. We take them
to bed with us. They weigh down our suitcases when we go on
holiday. We display them on our bookshelves or store them in our
attics. We give them as gifts. We write our names in them. We take
them for granted. And all the time, our books are leading a double
life.; The Secret Life of Books is about everything that isn't just
the words. It's about how books transform us as individuals. It's
about how books - and readers - have evolved over time. And it's
about why, even with the arrival of other media, books still have
the power to change our lives.; In this illuminating account, Tom
Mole looks at everything from binding innovations to binding
errors, to books defaced by lovers, to those imprisoning professors
in their offices, to books in art, to burned books, to the books
that create nations, to those we'll leave behind.; It will change
how you think about books.
Celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of Andrey Bely's
Petersburg, this volume offers a cross-section of essays that
address the most pertinent aspects of his 1916 masterpiece. The
plot is relatively a simple one: Nikolai Apollonovich is ordered by
a group of terrorists to assassinate his father, the prominent
senator, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. Nevertheless, Bely's
polyphonic, experimental prose invokes such diverse themes as:
Greek mythology, the apocalypse, family dynamics, psychology,
Russian history, theosophy, revolution, and European literary
influences. Considered by Vladimir Nabokov to be one of the
twentieth century's four greatest masterpieces, Petersburg is the
first novel in which the city is the hero. Frequently compared to
Joyce's Ulysses, no novel did more to help launch modernism in
turn-of-the century Russia.
Contemporary Latin American fiction establishes a unique connection
between masquerade, frequently motivated by stigma or trauma, and
social justice. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines
philosophy, history, psychology, literature, and social justice
theory, this study delineates the synergistic connection between
these two themes. Weldt-Basson examines fourteen novels by twelve
different Latin American authors: Mario Vargas Llosa, Sergio
Galindo, Augusto Roa Bastos, Fernando del Paso, Mayra
Santos-Febres, Isabel Allende, Carmen Boullosa, Antonio
Benitez-Rojo, Marcela Serrano, Sara Sefchovich, Luisa Valenzuela,
and Ariel Dorfman. She elucidates the varieties of social justice
operating in the plots of contemporary Latin American novels:
distributive, postmodern/feminist, postcolonial, transitional, and
historical justices. The author further examines how masquerade and
disguise aid in articulating the theme of social justice, why this
is important, and how it relates to Latin American history and the
historical novel.
A landmark volume that explores the interconnected nature of
technologies and rhetorical practice. Rhetorical Machines addresses
new approaches to studying computational processes within the
growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is
often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores
the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code
engages. In so doing, it argues that computation is in fact rife
with the values of those who create it and thus has powerful
ethical and moral implications. From Socrates's critique of writing
in Plato's Phaedrus to emerging new media and internet culture, the
scholars assembled here provide insight into how computation and
rhetoric work together to produce social and cultural effects. This
multidisciplinary volume features contributions from
scholar-practitioners across the fields of rhetoric, computer
science, and writing studies. It is divided into four main
sections: ""Emergent Machines"" examines how technologies and
algorithms are framed and entangled in rhetorical processes,
""Operational Codes"" explores how computational processes are used
to achieve rhetorical ends, ""Ethical Decisions and Moral
Protocols"" considers the ethical implications involved in
designing software and that software's impact on computational
culture, and the final section includes two scholars' responses to
the preceding chapters. Three of the sections are prefaced by brief
conversations with chatbots (autonomous computational agents)
addressing some of the primary questions raised in each section. At
the heart of these essays is a call for emerging and established
scholars in a vast array of fields to reach interdisciplinary
understandings of human-machine interactions. This innovative work
will be valuable to scholars and students in a variety of
disciplines, including but not limited to rhetoric, computer
science, writing studies, and the digital humanities.
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Minnereden
(German, Paperback)
Iulia-Emilia Dorobantu, Jacob Klingner, Ludger Lieb
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R1,203
R973
Discovery Miles 9 730
Save R230 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: these words have long
represented the promise of America, a ""shimmering vision of a
fruitful country open to all who come, learn, work, save, invest,
and play by the rules."" In 2004, Cal Jillson took stock of this
vision and showed how the nation's politicians deployed the
American Dream, both in campaigns and governance, to hold the
American people to their program. ""Full of startling ideas that
make sense,"" NPR's senior correspondent Juan Williams remarked,
Jillson's book offered the fullest exploration yet of the origins
and evolution of the ideal that serves as the foundation of our
national ethos and collective self-image. Nonetheless, in the dozen
years since Pursuing the American Dream was published, the American
Dream has fared poorly. The decline of social mobility and the rise
of income inequality-to say nothing of the extraordinary social,
political, and economic developments of the Bush and Obama
presidencies-have convinced many that the American Dream is no
more. This is the concern that Jillson addresses in his new book,
The American Dream: In History, Politics, and Fiction, which
juxtaposes the claims of political, social, and economic elite
against the view of American life consistently offered in our
national literature. Our great novelists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne
and Herman Melville to John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and
beyond highlight the limits and challenges of life-the difficulty
if not impossibility of the dream-especially for racial, ethnic,
and religious minorities as well as women. His book takes us
through the changing meaning and reality of the American Dream,
from the seventeenth century to the present day, revealing a
distinct, sustained separation between literary and political
elite. The American Dream, Jillson suggests, took shape early in
our national experience and defined the nation throughout its
growth and development, yet it has always been challenged, even
rejected, in our most celebrated literature. This is no different
in our day, when what we believe about the American Dream reveals
as much about its limits as its possibilities.
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.
An ideal introduction into the complex and compelling dramas of the
acclaimed playwright Now available in a paperback edition and
featuring a new preface, Understanding Sam Shepard investigates the
notoriously complex dramatic world of Sam Shepard, one of America's
most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging contemporary
playwrights. During his nearly fifty-year career as a writer,
actor, director, and producer, Shepard (1943-2017) consistently
focused his work on the ever-changing American cultural landscape.
James A. Crank's thorough study offers scholars and students of the
dramatist a means of understanding Shephard's frequent
experimentation with language, setting, character, and theme. The
new preface examines Shepard's legacy and his final work of
fiction, Spy of the First Person.
A History of Irish Modernism examines a wide variety of artworks
(from the 1890s to the 1970s), including examples from literature,
film, painting, music, radio, and architecture. Each chapter
considers a particular aspect of Irish culture and reflects on its
contribution to modernism at large. In addition to new research on
the Irish Revival and cultural nationalism, which places them
squarely in the modernist arena, chapters offer transnational and
transdisciplinary perspectives that place Irish cultural production
in new contexts. At the same time, the historical standpoint
adopted in each chapter enables the contributors to examine how
modernist practices developed across geographical and temporal
distances. A History of Irish Modernism thus attests to the unique
development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well
as artistic concerns - even as it embodies aesthetic principles
that are the hallmark of modernism in Europe, the Americas and
beyond.
Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin
America, Spain, and the United States, the essays of this book
present a radical critique against strategies of literary
appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even
concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the
position of the author as center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza
argues for the communality-a term used by anthropologist Floriberto
DIaz to describe modes of life of indigenous peoples of Oaxaca
based on notions of collaborative labor-permeating all writing
processes. Disappropriating is a political operation at the core of
projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that
writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers
borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt
relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to
the communities in which it grew. In an increasingly violent world,
where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction,
writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may
as well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and
resistance.
Millions of southerners left the South in the twentieth century in
a mass migration that has, in many ways, rewoven the fabric of
American society on cultural, political, and economic levels.
Because the movements of southerners-and people in general-are
controlled not only by physical boundaries marked on a map but also
by narratives that define movement, narrative is central in
building and sustaining borders and in breaking them down. In
Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of
Southern Identity, author Mary Weaks-Baxter analyzes narratives by
and about those who left the South and how those narratives have
remade what it means to be southern. Drawing from a broad range of
narratives, including literature, newspaper articles, art, and
music, Weaks-Baxter outlines how these displacement narratives
challenged concepts of southern nationhood and redefined southern
identity. Close attention is paid to how depictions of the South,
particularly in the media and popular culture, prompted southerners
to leave the region and changed perceptions of southerners to
outsiders as well as how southerners saw themselves. Through an
examination of narrative, Weaks-Baxter reveals the profound effect
gender, race, and class have on the nature of the migrant's
journey, the adjustment of the migrant, and the ultimate decision
of the migrant either to stay put or return home, and connects the
history of border crossings to the issues being considered in
today's national landscape.
"The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature Part Two" set is
comprised of "The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature,"
edited by Garrett A. Sulllivan Jr & Alan Stewart, and "The
Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature" edited by Frederick Burwick,
offering you a discount when buying both titles together.
"The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature" is a
comprehensive reference resource comprising individual titles
covering key literary genres, periods, and sub-disciplines. Also
available in the collection are "The Encyclopedia of Literary and
Cultural Theory," "The Encyclopedia of the Novel," and "The
Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction," published as Part One
in December 2010.
For more information on the complete collection, see
www.literatureencyclopedia.com.
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Colonel Chabert
(Paperback)
Honore De Balzac; Translated by Ellen Marriage, Clara Bell
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R299
Discovery Miles 2 990
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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When Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned
Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S.
Senate on May 21, 1856, southerners viewed the attack as a
triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a
confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly
divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John
Brown's raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia,
with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the cause of
freedom as southerners excoriated him as a consciousness fanatic.
These events opened American minds to the possibility that North
and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie's
defenders were willing to go one step further-to propose that
northerners and southerners represented not just a "divided people"
but two scientifically distinct races. In Normans and Saxons,
Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created
by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these
divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil
War. This mythology cast southerners as descendants of the Normans
of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the
seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and
populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in
mythic terms, by Saxons-Englishmen of German descent-some of whose
descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later
fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on
nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as
two separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and dashing Normans
versus the common and venal Saxons. According to Watson, southern
polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification
of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's
peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial
composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs
with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument
in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter
Scott, De Bow's Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to
fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William
Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the
Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also
traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in
"Lost Cause" thought and how the myth has affected ideas about
southern sectionalism of today. Normans and Saxons provides a
thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to
convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of
slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences
in racial temperament-differences that made civil war inevitable.
This volume widens the field of Soviet literature studies by
interpreting it as a multinational project, with national
literatures acting not as copies of the Russian model, but as
creators of a multidimensional literary space. The book proposes a
reconsideration of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of literary field and
analyzes the interactions of literature, power, and economics under
the communist rule. The articles selected include theoretical
discussions and case studies from different national literatures
presenting different structural elements of the Soviet literary
field, as well as different phenomena created by the complexity of
the field itself, such as the Aesopian language, state of emergency
literature, or compromise as the essential element of the writers'
identity.
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