This first full-length study of William Bronk, one of our most important contemporary poets and essayists, locates his work in relation to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England literary tradition, to later twentieth-century modernism, and to the subsequent Objectivist and Black Mountain schools of poetry. Through special attention to his uniquely elegant style, this study demonstrates how Bronk has brought together earlier American poetics and philosophy with modern and postmodern notions of being, emptiness, and nothingness. This book features extensive discussions of Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, as well as of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Cid Corman, and George Oppen. As particularly concerns these twentieth-century figures, Burt Kimmelman also sheds light on the role in their thinking and poetics played by post-positivist science especially its theories of relativity and uncertainty. Analyses of exchanges of letters, most critically between Oppen and Bronk, disclose the great influence of their writing of contemporary intellectual currents aside from poetry itself. Kimmelmans discussion of epistemology is central to understanding this subtle and at times complex poet. The book explains ultimately how, as Michael Heller observes, 'Bronk is, in some sense, a reshaper of an American transcendental tradition, a strong poet of paradoxicality and worldlessness.' Discussions of solitude and abnegation, two key ideas Bronk derives from Thoreau and Melville, reveal not only the roots of Bronks concepts of being, emptiness, and nothingness, but also essential aspects of late-twentieth-century philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics anticipated by Bronk, Borman, Creeley, Olson, Oppen, and others over half a century ago.

The revisions of the French Revolution by three prominent eighteenth- century writers are focused on in this book. The implication in the OtraditionO these writers rebelled against raises fundamental questions about the representations of rebels and Romantics as well as our canonical readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts.

In an ambitious reappraisal of Langston Hughes's work and legacy, Ryan James Kernan reads Hughes's political poetry in the context of his practice of translation to reveal an important meditation on diaspora. Drawing on heretofore unearthed archival evidence, Kernan shows how Hughes mined his engagements with the poetics of Louis Aragon, Nicolas Guillen, Regino Pedroso, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Leopold Sedar Senghor, as well as translations of his own poetry, to fashion a radical poetics that engaged Black left internationalist concerns. As he follows Hughes from Harlem to Havana, Moscow, Madrid, and finally to Dakar, Kernan reveals how the writer's identity and aesthetic were translated within these leftist geographies and metropoles, by others but also collaboratively. As Kernan argues, we cannot know Hughes without knowing him in translation. Through original research and close readings alert to the foreign prosody underlying Hughes's work, New World Maker recuperates his political writing, which had been widely maligned by Cold War detractors and adherents of New Criticism, and affirms his place as a progenitor of African diasporic literature and within the pantheon of US modernists. Demonstrating the integral part translation played in Hughes's creative process, this book challenges a number of common assumptions about this canonical thinker and offers important insights for scholars of African diasporic literature, comparative literature, and American, Caribbean, and translation studies.

The first book to analyse cultural dynamics of Chinese migration to Italy, Migration and the Media compares Italian, Chinese migrant, and international media interpretations between 1992 and 2012. From paternalistic tones reducing migrants' motives to poverty or political oppression to fear-mongering diatribes about illegal business practices, tax evasion, and unfair competition, the Italian and international media covered this large-scale migration extensively during this period. The Chinese community also joined in the media polyphony with articles in their own newspapers and magazines, more likely refuting biased mainstream media coverage or protesting the harsh regulations that seemed to target the Chinese, but sometimes even advising fellow migrants on how to counter the media's criticism. Gaoheng Zhang places the strong media interest in Italian-Chinese migrant relations within relevant economic, political, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Examining how journalists, entrepreneurs, and politicians debated Italy's Chinese, Zhang argues that these stakeholders viewed the migration as a particularly effective example to support or dispute Italy's general stance toward migrant integration and economic globalization.

HandiLand looks at young adult novels, fantasy series, graphic memoirs, and picture books of the last 25 years in which characters with disabilities take center stage for the first time. These books take what others regard as weaknesses-for instance, Harry Potter's headaches or Hazel Lancaster's oxygen tank-and redefine them as part of the hero's journey. HandiLand places this movement from sidekick to hero in the political contexts of disability rights movements in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ghana.Elizabeth A. Wheeler invokes the fantasy of HandiLand, an ideal society ready for young people with disabilities before they get there, as a yardstick to measure how far we've come and how far we still need to go toward the goal of total inclusion. The book moves through the public spaces young people with disabilities have entered, including schools, nature, and online communities. As a disabled person and parent of children with disabilities, Wheeler offers an inside look into families who collude with their kids in shaping a better world. Moving, funny, and beautifully written, HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth is the definitive study of disability in contemporary literature for young readers.

This collection, which brings together a substantial body of East European poetry published in the 1980s, emphasizes the work of a decade that led to one of the most significant turning points in the history of that region, if not the modern world.

No genre manifests the pleasure of reading - and its power to consume and enchant - more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures. Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus's Ethiopian Story, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Fielding's Tom Jones, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Burney's The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.

Recounting the murder of an elderly woman by a student expelled from university, Crime and Punishment is a psychological and political novel that portrays the strains on Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its protagonist, Raskolnikov, moves in a world of dire poverty, disillusionment, radicalism, and nihilism interwoven with religious faith and utopianism. In Dostoevsky's innovative style, which he called fantastic realism, the narrator frequently reports from within the protagonist's mind. The depiction of the desperate lives of tradespeople, students, alcoholics, prostitutes, and criminals gives readers insight into the urban society of St. Petersburg at the time. The first part of this book offers instructors guidance on Russian editions and English translations, a map of St. Petersburg showing locations mentioned in the novel, a list of characters and an explanation of the Russian naming system, analysis of key scenes, and selected critical works on the novel. In the second part, essays address many of Dostoevsky's themes and consider the role of ethics, gender, money, Orthodox Christianity, and social justice in the narrative. The volume concludes with essays on digital media and film adaptations.