Between 1868 and 1898, three generations of Cubans fought to free Cuba from colonialist Spain. More than a century later, no other historical narrative is as beloved and ritualistically recited as the story of Cuba Libre and the citizen-soldier known as the mambi. In town festivals and cartoons, in textbooks and hymns, in the national currency and logos alike, the mambi is the foremost icon of Cuba's past and present. Scrutinizing how this figure has been aesthetically rendered in literature, historiography, cinema, and monuments, Eric Morales-Franceschini teases out the emancipatory promises that the story of Cuba Libre came to embody in the twentieth-century popular imagination.The story of Cuba Libre and the mambi is not, after all, a conventional epic. For how does one account for heroes that are neither demigods nor nobles? For tactics more sly than virtuous? Or verse more populist than eloquent? Analyzing the mambi as Afro-Cuban, woman, trickster, saboteur, and martyr, this critical exegesis shows how that heroic archetype has come to bear on issues such as racial justice, women's empowerment, populist humor, the ethics of violence, and the nationalist sublime. With an eye toward decolonial futures, The Epic of Cuba Libre illuminates the complexities and idiosyncrasies of an aesthetics of liberation.

From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles. No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree-a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history-and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers-intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually-than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn't need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more. From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers: How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning. The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries. How to listen for a poem's secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up. How to hear the music in poems-and the poetry in songs! With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols, a review quiz and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

The Irish writers of the 1890s-Somerville and Ross, George Moore, Edward Martyn, George Russell, and William Butler Yeats-repeatedly sought to define for their literature and nation a messianic hero and thus to help shape the political and social consciousness of the Irish people. Wayne Hall examines the writing of this decade within its economic and political context, especially the relationship of literature to the issues of land reform and the decline of the Protestant Ascendancy in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Literature and politics tenuously joined forces early in the decade. But the writers came increasingly to identify their own interests with those of the old social order and the landed gentry. They deplored the materialism and egalitarianism that was sweeping aside the manorial past, and as a way of preserving, at least temporarily, the values associated with economic feudalism, they brought to the vanishing way of life its finest artistic expression. The 1890s thus proved to be a crucial transition period, and later Irish writers took many of their themes and literary concerns from this decade. The early stages of the Irish Renaissance also exemplify a problem recurring throughout twentieth-century Western art-the alienation of the artist from society. Failing to unite with and transform the actual circumstances of Ireland, the writers responded by retreating from it and by substituting instead myths of their own making.

"I never could keep the world properly divided into gods and demons for very long," wrote John Dos Passos, whose predilection toward nuance and tolerance brought him to see himself as a "chronicler": a writer who might portray political situations and characters but would not deliberately lead the reader to a predetermined conclusion. Privileging the tangible over the ideological, Dos Passos's writing between the two World Wars reveals the enormous human costs of modern warfare and ensuing political upheavals. This wide-ranging and engaging collection of essays explores the work of Dos Passos during a time that challenged writers to find new ways to understand and render the unfolding of history. Taking their foci from a variety of disciplines, including fashion, theater, and travel writing, the contributors extend the scholarship on Dos Passos beyond his best-known U.S.A. trilogy. Including scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, the volume takes on such topics as how writers should position their labor in relation to that of blue-collar workers and how Dos Passos's views of Europe changed from fascination to disillusionment. Examinations of the Modernist's Adventures of a Young Man, Manhattan Transfer, and "The Republic of Honest Men" increase our understanding of the work of a complicated figure in American literature, set against a backdrop of rapidly evolving technology, growing religious skepticism, and political turmoil in the wake of World War I.

Across Palestine, from the Allenby Bridge and Ramallah, to Jerusalem and Gaza, Marcello Di Cintio has met with writers, poets, librarians, booksellers and readers, finding extraordinary stories in every corner. Stories of how revolutionary writing is smuggled from the Naqab Prison, and about what it is like to write with only two hours of electricity each day. Stories from the Gallery Cafe, whose opening three thousand creative intellectuals gathered to celebrate; and the lost generations of stories contained within the looted books that sit in Israel's National Library. Pay No Heed to the Rockets offers a window into the literary heritage of Palestine that transcends the narrow language of conflict, revealing a humanity often unreported. Paying homage to the memory of literary giants like Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani and the contemporary authors whom they continue to inspire, this evocative, lyrical journey shares both the anguish and inspiration of Palestine today.

In this book, the first to explore the role of disability in the writings of James Joyce, contributors approach the subject both on a figurative level, as a symbol or metaphor in Joyce's work, and also as a physical reality for many of Joyce's characters. Contributors examine the varying ways in which Joyce's texts represent disability and the environmental conditions of his time that stigmatized, isolated, and othered individuals with disabilities. The collection demonstrates the centrality of the body and embodiment in Joyce's writings, from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Essays address Joyce's engagement with paralysis, masculinity, childhood violence, trauma, disorderly eating, blindness, nineteenth-century theories of degeneration, and the concept of "madness." Together, the essays offer examples of Joyce's interest in the complexities of human existence and in challenging assumptions about bodily and mental norms. Complete with an introduction that summarizes key disability studies concepts and the current state of research on the subject in Joyce studies, this volume is a valuable resource for disability scholars interested in modernist literature and an ideal starting point for any Joycean new to the study of disability.

Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (included essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe. Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, this feminist, folkloristic approach deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women's speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly. However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, breakthrough these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince "hopepunk." They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today's world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture's still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity.

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in translation (SFT). Rachel Cordasco examines speculative fiction published in English translation since 1960, ranging from Soviet-era fiction to the Arabic-language dystopias that emerged following the Iraq War. Individual chapters on SFT from Korean, Czech, Finnish, and eleven other source languages feature an introduction by an expert in the language's speculative fiction tradition and its present-day output. Cordasco then breaks down each chapter by subgenre--including science fiction, fantasy, and horror--to guide readers toward the kinds of works that most interest them. Her discussion of available SFT stands alongside an analysis of how various subgenres emerged and developed in a given language. She also examines the reasons a given subgenre has been translated into English. An informative and one-of-a-kind guide, Out of This World offers readers and scholars alike a tour of speculative fiction's new globalized era.

The Price of Slavery analyzes Marx's critique of capitalist slavery and its implications for the Caribbean thought of Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, C. L. R. James, Aime Cesaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Suzanne Cesaire. Nick Nesbitt assesses the limitations of the literature on capitalism and slavery since Eric Williams in light of Marx's key concept of the social forms of labor, wealth, and value. To do so, Nesbitt systematically reconstructs for the first time Marx's analysis of capitalist slavery across the three volumes of Capital. The book then follows the legacy of Caribbean critique in its reflections on the social forms of labor, servitude, and freedom, as they culminate in the vehement call for the revolutionary transformation of an unjust colonial order into one of universal justice and equality.

This work is a valuable addition to understanding issues of the press and censorship in France. Rodmell's introduction emphasizes publication problems faced by writers in eighteenth- century France. This edition includes Malesherbes's first and second Memoire, to which Rodmell adds seventeen pages of notes. In his Memoire, Malesherbes suggests changes to the book trade and condemns censorship's arbitrary nature. Rodmell's introductory analysis proposes that Malesherbes wanted to make censorship a tool for liberalism.

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge, scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate. Booksellers, authors, and academics have been talking about world literature since Goethe made the term fashionable in the early nineteenth century. Yet amidst all the talk of books that 'circulate' and literature as a kind of universal property that can function as a 'window on the world', how do we account for the people who live in real places, and who write, translate, market, and read the texts that travel on these global journeys? World Authorship breaks new ground by showing how to bring together the real-world contexts of authorship with the literary worlds of fiction. Written by world-leading academics and creative professionals including authors, translators, publishers, editors, prize jurors, and literary festival organizers, World Authorship updates Michael Foucault's 'author function' by significantly expanding the network of people and practices involved in literature. It covers keyword aspects of world authorship, grounding them in the study of actual literary texts to illuminate how literature is shared and made in different parts of the world and at different times in history. At the heart of all contributions, however, is one key question: where is the human element in world literature? By covering everything from 'Beginnings' to 'Voice', World Authorship provides the answer.

The Short Oxford History of English Literature provides a comprehensive and authoritative introductory guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, including a full treatment of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh writing in English. The chapters are arranged chronologically, covering all major periods of English literature from Old English to the post-war era, including the medieval period, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Romanticism, the Victorians, Modernism, and Postmodernism. In addition to a detailed discussion of all major figures and their works, Andrew Sanders examines throughout the relationship between the literary landscape and wider contemporary social, political, and intellectual developments.
This edition contains a range of new entries on important contemporary authors and an increased focus on female writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as a fully updated and revised bibliography.

Lothario's Corpse unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain's eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While standard theater histories emphasize libertine drama's gradual disappearance from the nation's acting repertory following the dispersal of Stuart rule in 1688, Daniel Gustafson traces its persistent appeal for writers and performers wrestling with the powers of the emergent liberal subject and the tensions of that subject with sovereign absolutism. With its radical, absolutist characters and its scenarios of aristocratic license, Restoration libertine drama became a critical force with which to engage in debates about the liberty-loving British subject's relation to key forms of liberal power and about the troubling allure of lawless sovereign power that lingers at the heart of the liberal imagination. Weaving together readings of a set of literary texts, theater anecdotes, political writings, and performances, Gustafson illustrates how the corpse of the Restoration stage libertine is revived in the period's debates about liberty, sovereign desire, and the subject's relation to modern forms of social control. Ultimately, Lothario's Corpse suggests the 'long-running' nature of Restoration theatrical culture, its revived and revised performances vital to what makes post-1688 Britain modern.

An environmental humanist's study of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation in Indian fiction. Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels that dramatize the impacts of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation on local communities in several Indian states. In this materialist history of development on the subcontinent, Stacey Balkan considers works by Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga that critique violent campaigns of enclosure and dispossession at the hands of corporate entities like the English East India Company and its many legatees. By foregrounding the intersections among landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression, Rogues in the Postcolony also attends to the complicity of popular aesthetic forms with political and economic policy, as well as the colonial and extractivist logics that often frame discussions around the so-called Anthropocene epoch. Bringing together questions about settler-colonial practices and environmental injustice, Rogues in the Postcolony concludes with an investigation of new extractivist frontiers, including solar capitalism, and considers the possibility of imagining life after extraction on the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

This Companion volume offers a sweeping survey of the Bible as a work of literature and its impact on Western writing. Underscoring the sophistication of the biblical writers' thinking in diverse areas of thought, it demonstrates how the Bible relates to many types of knowledge and its immense contribution to education through the ages. The volume emphasizes selected texts chosen from different books of the Bible and from later Western writers inspired by it. Individual essays, each written specially for this book, examine topics such as the gruesome wonders of apocalyptic texts, the erotic content of the Song of Songs, and Jesus' and Paul's language and reasoning, as well as Shakespeare's reflections on repentance in King Lear, Milton's genius in writing Paradise Lost, the social necessity of individual virtue in Shelley's poetry, and the mythic status of Melville's Moby Dick in the United States and the Western world in general.

In this complete, unabridged edition of H.D.'s visionary memoir, The Gift, Jane Augustine makes available for the first time the text as H.D. wrote it and intended it to be read, including H.D.'s coda to the book, her "Notes," never before published in its entirety.

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare is the most comprehensive reference work available on Shakespeare's life, times, works, and his 400-year global legacy. In addition to the authoritative A-Z entries, it includes nearly 100 illustrations, a chronology, a guide to further reading, a thematic contents list, and special feature entries on each of Shakespeare's works. Tying in with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this much-loved Companion has been revised and updated, reflecting developments and discoveries made in recent years and to cover the performance, interpretation, and the influence of Shakespeare's works up to the present day. First published in 2001, the online edition was revised in 2011, with updates to over 200 entries plus 16 new entries. These online updates appear in print for the first time in this second edition, along with a further 35,000 new and revised words. These include more than 80 new entries, ranging from important performers, directors, and scholars (such as Lucy Bailey, Samuel West, and Alfredo Michel Modenessi), to topics as diverse as Shakespeare in the digital age and the ubiquity of plants in Shakespeare's works, to the interpretation of Shakespeare globally, from Finland to Iraq. To make information on Shakespeare's major works easier to find, the feature entries have been grouped and placed in a centre section (fully cross-referenced from the A-Z). The thematic listing of entries - described in the press as 'an invaluable panorama of the contents' - has been updated to include all of the new entries. This edition contains a preface written by much-lauded Shakespearian actor Simon Russell Beale. Full of both entertaining trivia and scholarly detail, this authoritative Companion will delight the browser and reward students, academics, as well as anyone wanting to know more about Shakespeare.

In the years of and around the First World War, American poets, fiction writers, and dramatists came to the forefront of the international movement we call Modernism. At the same time a vast amount of non- and anti-Modernist culture was produced, mostly supporting, but also critical of, the US war effort. A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War explores this fraught cultural moment, teasing out the multiple and intricate relationships between an insurgent Modernism, a still-powerful traditional culture, and a variety of cultural and social forces that interacted with and influenced them. Including genre studies, focused analyses of important wartime movements and groups, and broad historical assessments of the significance of the war as prosecuted by the United States on the world stage, this book presents original essays defining the state of scholarship on the American culture of the First World War.

Henry James left America in 1875 for the sake of his art and for the rich cultural heritage of Europe. His return in the late summer of 1904, based on both romantic and practical motives, allowed him to revisit the now-transformed cities of his youth as well as to experience for the first time the country's southern states. The American Scene is a major work from James' final, most adventurous creative phase and offers a cultural and social critique of contemporary American society as well as a personal series of 'gathered impressions', a form of indirect yet sometimes intimate autobiography. This new edition includes detailed explanatory notes, a general introduction, a chronology, an itinerary of James' journey, a record of textual variants and rare manuscript material, appendices which include the journal James kept, texts for the two lectures he gave, and two additional essays written on his return to England.

Decadence and Literature explains how the concept of decadence developed since Roman times into a major cultural trope with broad explanatory power. No longer just a term of opprobrium for mannered art or immoral behaviour, decadence today describes complex cultural and social responses to modernity in all its forms. From the Roman emperor's indulgence in luxurious excess as both personal vice and political control, to the Enlightenment libertine's rational pursuit of hedonism, to the nineteenth-century dandy's simultaneous delight and distaste with modern urban life, decadence has emerged as a way of taking cultural stock of major social changes. These changes include the role of women in forms of artistic expression and social participation formerly reserved for men, as well as the increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ relationships, a development with a direct relationship to decadence. Today, decadence seems more important than ever to an informed understanding of contemporary anxieties and uncertainties.

Huckleberry Finn, Anna Karenina, Harry Potter, Hester Prynne...these are just a handful of remarkable characters to be found in literature, but of course, the list of memorable characters is virtually endless! But why ponder which of these creations are the greatest? More than just a topic to debate with friends, the greatest characters from fiction help readers comprehend history, culture, politics, and even their own place in today's world. Despite our reliance on television, film, and technology, it is literature's great characters that create and reinforce popular culture, informing us again and again about society and ourselves. In The 100 Greatest Literary Characters, three scholars of literature identify the most significant figures in fiction published over the last several centuries. From Jay Gatsby to Jean Valjean, the characters profiled here represent a wide array of storytelling, and the authors explore each one's significance at the time they were created as well as their relevance today. Included in this volume are characters from literature produced around the world, such as Aladdin, James Bond, Holden Caulfield, Hercule Poirot, Don Quixote, Lisbeth Salander, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Yuri Zhivago. Readers of this volume will find their beloved literary figures, learn about forgotten gems, or discover deserving choices pulled from history's dustbin. Providing insights into how literature shapes and molds culture via these fabricated figures, The 100 Greatest Literary Characters will appeal to literature lovers around the globe.

George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron (1788-1824), was one of the most celebrated poets of the Romantic period, as well as a peer, politician and global celebrity, famed not only for his verse, but for his controversial lifestyle and involvement in the Greek War of Independence. In thirty-seven concise, accessible essays, by leading international scholars, this volume explores the social and intertextual relationships that informed Byron's writing; the geopolitical contexts in which he travelled, lived and worked; the cultural and philosophical movements that influenced changing outlooks on religion, science, modern society and sexuality; the dramatic landscape of war, conflict and upheaval that shaped Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe and Regency Britain; and the diverse cultures of reception that mark the ongoing Byron phenomenon as a living ecology in the twenty-first century. This volume illuminates how we might think of Byron in context, but also as a context in his own right.