Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is Argentina's most celebrated author. This volume brings together for the first time the numerous contexts in which he lived and worked; from the history of the Borges family and that of modern Argentina, through two world wars, to events including the Cuban Revolution, military dictatorship, and the Falklands War. Borges' distinctive responses to the Western tradition, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Kafka, and the European avant garde are explored, along with his appraisals of Sarmiento, gauchesque literature and other strands of the Argentine cultural tradition. Borges' polemical stance on Catholic integralism in early twentieth-century Argentina is accounted for, whilst chapters on Buddhism, Judaism and landmarks of Persian literature illustrate Borges's engagement with the East. Finally, his legacy is visible in the literatures of the Americas, in European countries such as Italy and Portugal, and in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, representing the Global South.

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno both turned to canonical literary narratives to determine why the Enlightenment project was derailed and how this failure might be remedied. The resultant works, Benjamin's major essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities and Adorno's meditation on the Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment, are centrally concerned with the very act of narration. Marton Dornbach's groundbreaking book reconstructs a hitherto unnoticed, wide-ranging dialogue between these foundational texts of the Frankfurt School.At the heart of Dornbach's argument is a critical model that Benjamin built around the concept of caesura, a model Adorno subsequently reworked. Countering an obscurantism that would become complicit in the rise of fascism, the two theorists aligned moments of arrest in narratives mired in unreason. Although this model responded to a specific historical emergency, it can be adapted to identify utopian impulses in a variety of works. The Saving Line throws fresh light on the intellectual exchange and disagreements between Benjamin and Adorno, the problematic conjunction of secular reason and negative theology in their thinking, and their appropriations of ancient and modern legacies. It will interest scholars of philosophy and literature, critical theory, German Jewish thought, classical reception studies, and narratology.

The debate and discussion around Game of Thrones has covered questions of climate issues, industrialization, and questions of power, sex and gender. But in this essential companion to both George R.R. Martin's novels and the HBO show, Carolyne Larrington explores how this remarkable universe was constructed from the actual Middle Ages. The book examines sigils, giants, dragons and direwolves in medieval texts; ravens, old gods and the Weirwood in Norse myth; and a gothic, exotic orient in the eastern continent, Essos. From the White Walkers to the Red Woman, from Casterly Rock to the Shivering Sea, this is an indispensable guide to the 21st-century's most important fantasy creation.

Here, for the first time in English, is celebrated French classicist Jacques Jouanna's magisterial account of the life and work of Sophocles. Exhaustive and authoritative, this acclaimed book combines biography and detailed studies of Sophocles' plays, all set in the rich context of classical Greek tragedy and the political, social, religious, and cultural world of Athens's greatest age, the fifth century. Sophocles was the commanding figure of his day. The author of Oedipus Rex and Antigone, he was not only the leading dramatist but also a distinguished politician, military commander, and religious figure. And yet the evidence about his life has, until now, been fragmentary. Reconstructing a lost literary world, Jouanna has finally assembled all the available information, culled from inscriptions, archaeological evidence, and later sources. He also offers a huge range of new interpretations, from his emphasis on the significance of Sophocles' political and military offices (previously often seen as honorary) to his analysis of Sophocles' plays in the mythic and literary context of fifth-century drama. Written for scholars, students, and general readers, this book will interest anyone who wants to know more about Greek drama in general and Sophocles in particular. With an extensive bibliography and useful summaries not only of Sophocles' extant plays but also, uniquely, of the fragments of plays that have been partially lost, it will be a standard reference in classical studies for years to come.

Leading scholars examine the history of climate and literature. Essays analyse this history in terms of the contrasts between literary and climatological time, and between literal and literary atmosphere, before addressing textual representations of climate in seasons poetry, classical Greek literature, medieval Icelandic and Greenlandic sagas, and Shakespearean theatre. Beyond this, the effect of Enlightenment understandings of climate on literature are explored in Romantic poetry, North American settler literature, the novels of empire, Victorian and modernist fiction, science fiction, and Nordic noir or crime fiction. Finally, the volume addresses recent literary framings of climate in the Anthropocene, charting the rise of the climate change novel, the spectre of extinction in the contemporary cultural imagination, and the relationship between climate criticism and nuclear criticism. Together, the essays in this volume outline the discursive dimensions of climate. Climate is as old as human civilisation, as old as all attempts to apprehend and describe patterns in the weather. Because climate is weather documented, it necessarily possesses an intimate relationship with language, and through language, to literature. This volume challenges the idea that climate belongs to the realm of science and is separate from literature and the realm of the imagination.

The Soviet Writers' Union offered writers elite status and material luxuries in exchange for literature that championed the state. This book argues that Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin chose leaders for this crucial organization, such as Maxim Gorky and Alexander Fadeyev, who had psychological traits he could exploit. Stalin ensured their loyalty with various rewards but also with a philosophical argument calculated to assuage moral qualms, allowing them to feel they were not trading ethics for self-interest. Employing close textual analysis of public and private documents including speeches, debate transcripts, personal letters, and diaries, Carol Any exposes the misgivings of Writers' Union leaders as well as the arguments they constructed when faced with a cognitive dissonance. She tells a dramatic story that reveals the interdependence of literary policy, communist morality, state-sponsored terror, party infighting, and personal psychology. This book will be an important reference for scholars of the Soviet Union as well as anyone interested in identity, the construction of culture, and the interface between art and ideology.

Books; reading, collecting and the physical housing of them has brought the book-lover joy - and stress - for centuries. Fascinated writers have tried to capture the particular relationships we form with our library, and the desperate troubles we will undergo to preserve it. With Alex Johnson as your guide, immerse yourself in this eclectic anthology and hear from an iconic Prime Minister musing over the best way to store your books and an illustrious US President explaining the best works to read outdoors. Enjoy serious speculations on the psychological implications of reading from a 19th century philosopher, and less serious ones concerning the predicament of dispensing with unwanted volumes or the danger of letting children (the `enemies of books') near your collection. The many facets of book-mania are pondered and celebrated with both sincerity and irreverence in this lively selection of essays, poems, lectures and commentaries ranging from the 16th to the 20th century.

This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865-1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.

The period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly 'free' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.

African American literature in the years between 1800 and 1830 emerged from significant transitions in the cultural, technological, and political circulation of ideas. Transformations included increased numbers of Black organizations, shifts in the physical mobility of Black peoples, expanded circulation of abolitionist and Black newsprint as well as greater production of Black authored texts and images. The perpetuation of slavery in the early American republic meant that many people of African descent conveyed experiences of bondage or promoted abolition in complex ways, relying on a diverse array of print and illustrative forms. Accordingly, this volume takes a thematic approach to African American literature from 1800 to 1830, exploring Black organizational life before 1830, movement and mobility in African American literature, and print culture in circulation, illustration, and the narrative form.

Conversations with Graham Swift is the first collection of interviews conducted with the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders. Beginning in 1985 with Swift's arrival in New York to promote Waterland and concluding with an interview from 2016 that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the collection spans Swift's more than thirty-five-year career as a writer. The volume also includes interviews first printed in English as well as translated from the French or Spanish and covers a wide range of formats, from lengthier interviews published in standard academic journals, to those for radio, newspapers, and, more recently, podcasts. In these interviews, Graham Swift (b. 1949) offers insights into his life and career, including his friendships with other contemporary writers like Ted Hughes and the group of celebrated novelists who emerged in Britain during the eighties. With remarkable clarity, Swift discusses the themes of his novels and short stories: death, love, history, parent-child relationships, the power of the imagination, the role of storytelling, and the consequences of knowing. He also notes the influences, literary and personal, that have helped shape his writing career. While quite ordinary in his life and daily habits, Swift reveals his penetrating intellect and rich imagination-an imagination that can craft some of the most engaging and formally complex stories in the language.

Contributions by Megan Brown, Jill Coste, Sara K. Day, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Amber Gray, Roxanne Harde, Tom Jesse, Heidi Jones, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Leah Phillips, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, S. R. Toliver, Jason Vanfosson, Sarah E. Whitney, and Casey Alane WilsonWhile critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first-century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, classroom materials and scholarship have remained static in focus and slight in scope. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give overwhelm conversations among scholars and critics-but these are far from the only texts in need of analysis. Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limiting perspective, bringing together essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have until now been overlooked. The collection tackles a diverse range of topics-modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice. The approaches are united, though, by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting entryway into a field that continues to grow and change even as its works captivate massive audiences. It will prove a crucial addition to the library of any scholar or instructor of young adult literature.

The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry provides historical context on the evolution of the Latin American poetic tradition from the sixteenth century to the present day. It is organized into three parts. Part I provides a comprehensive, chronological survey of Latin American poetry and includes separate chapters on Colonial poetry, Romanticism/modernism, the avant-garde, conversational poetry, and contemporary poetry. Part II contains six succinct essays on the major figures Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Octavio Paz. Part III analyses specific and distinctive trends within the poetic canon, including women's, LGBT, Quechua, Afro-Hispanic, Latino/a and New Media poetry. This Companion also contains a guide to further reading as well as an essay on the best English translations of Latin American poetry. It will be a key resource for students and instructors of Latin American literature and poetry.

In her book Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender, Margaret Roman argues that one theme colors almost every short story and novel by the turn-of-the-century American author: each person, regardless of sex, must break free of the restrictive, polar-opposite norms of behavior traditionally assigned to men and women by a patriarchal society. That society, as seen from Jewett's perspective during the late Victorian era, was one in which a competitive, active man dominates a passive, emotional woman. Frequently referring to Jewett's own New England upbringing at the hands of an unusually progressive father, Roman demonstrates how the writer, through her personal quest for freedom and through the various characters she created, strove to eliminate the necessity for rigid and narrowly defined male-female roles and relationships. With the details of Jewett's free-spirited life, Roman's book represents a solid work of literary scholarship, which traces a gender-dissolving theme throughout Jewett's writing. Whereas previous critics have focused primarily on her best-known works, including "A White Heron," Deephaven, A Country Doctor, and The Country of the Pointed Firs, Roman encompasses within her own discussion virtually all of the stories found in the nineteen volumes Jewett published during her lifetime. And although much recent criticism has centered around Jewett's strong female characters, Roman is the first to explore in depth Jewett's male characters and married couples. The book progresses through distinct phases that roughly correspond to Jewett's psychological development as a writer. In general, the characters in her early works exhibit one of two modes of behavior. Youngsters, free as Jewett was to explore the natural world of woods and field, glimpse the possibility of escape from the confining standards that society has set, though some experience turbulent and confusing adolescences where those norms have become more pressing, more demanding. At the opposite extreme are those who have mindlessly accepted the roles in which they have been trapped since youth-greedy, selfish men, dutiful women who tend emotionally empty houses, young couples unable to communicate either between themselves or with others-in short, characters who are too alienated within their roles to function as whole human beings. On the other hand, Jewett approaches the men and women of her later works with a higher degree of optimism, in that each person is free to live according to the dictates of his or her inherent personality-each character is able to measure life from within rather than from without. This group includes the self-confident men who are not reluctant to present a nurturing side, and the warm, giving women who are unafraid of displaying a decided inner strength. As Roman summarizes, "In her writings, Jewett attempts to shift society's focus from a grasping power over people to the personal development of each member of society." Ahead of her time in many ways, Sarah Orne Jewett confronted the Victorian polarized gender system, presaging the modern view that men and women should be encouraged to develop along whatever paths are most comfortable and most natural for them.

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.

The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms - from the roman a clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations - this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.

Provides cross-disciplinary perspectives on the study of animals in humanities This volume critically investigates current topics and disciplines that are affected, enriched or put into dispute by the burgeoning scholarship on Animal Studies. What new questions and modes of research need come into play if we are to seriously acknowledge our entanglements with other animals? World-leading scholars from a range of disciplines, including Literature, Philosophy, Art, Biosemiotics, and Geography, set the agenda for Animal Studies today. Rather than a narrow specialism, the 35 newly commissioned essays in this book show how we think of other animals to be intrinsic to fields as major as ethics, economies as widespread as capitalism and relations as common as friendship. The volume contains original, cutting-edge research and opens up new methods, alignments, directions as well as challenges for the future of Animal Studies. Uniquely, the chapters each focus on a single topic, from 'Abjection' to 'Voice' and from 'Affection' to 'Technology', thus embedding the animal question as central to contemporary concerns across a wide range of disciplines. Key Features Provides in one work prominent scholars in animal studies and their reflections on the trajectory of the field Embeds the 'animal question' as central to contemporary concerns across a wide range of disciplines Brings discourses from the sciences into dialogue with the arts and humanities Opens up new methods, alignments, directions and challenges for the future of animal studies Afterword from Cary Wolfe (Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English, Rice University)

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.

Immerse yourself in the stories behind the most shocking and infamous books ever published! Censorship of one form or another has existed almost as long as the written word, while definitions of what is deemed "acceptable" in published works have shifted over the centuries, and from culture to culture. Banned Books explores why some of the world's most important literary classics and seminal non-fiction titles were once deemed too controversial for the public to read - whether for challenging racial or sexual norms, satirizing public figures, or simply being deemed unfit for young readers. From the banning of All Quiet on the Western Front and the repeated suppression of On the Origin of the Species, to the uproar provoked by Lady Chatterley's Lover, entries offer a fascinating chronological account of censorship and the astonishing role that some banned books have played in changing history. Packed with eye-opening insights into the history of the written word and the political and social climate during the period of suppression or censorship, this is a must-read for anyone interested in literature; creative writing; politics; history or law. Delve into this compelling collection of the world's most controversial books to discover: - Covers a broad range of genres and subject areas in fiction and non-fiction, ranging from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Spycatcher - Offers informative insights into society, politics, law, and religious belief, in different countries around the world - Features images of first editions and specially commissioned illustrations of the books' authors - Includes extracts from the banned books along with key quotations about them - Completely global in scope A must-have volume for avid readers and literary scholars alike, alongside those with an interest in the law, politics and censorship, Banned Books profiles a selection of the most infamous, intriguing and controversial books ever written, whilst offering a unique perspective on the history of the written world - with insights into the often surprising reasons books have been banned throughout history and across the world. Whether as a gift or self-purchase, this brilliant book is a must-have addition to the library of curious thinkers, borrowers and lifelong learners. If you enjoy Banned Books, then why not try Great Loves - the first title in DK's quirky new hardback series, full of insightful and intriguing topics.

Literature has been essential to shaping the notions of human personhood, good life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that have been central to human rights law, discourse, and politics. The literary study of human rights has also recently generated innovative and timely perspectives on the history, meaning, and scope of human rights. The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature introduces this new and exciting field of study in the humanities. It explores the historical and institutional contexts, theoretical concepts, genres, and methods that literature and human rights share. Equally accessible to beginners in the field and more advanced researches, this Companion emphasizes both the literary and interdisciplinary dimensions of human rights and the humanities.

The selected essays of James Wood - our greatest living literary critic and author of How Fiction Works 'James Wood is a close reader of genius... By turns luscious and muscular, committed and disdaining, passionate and minutely considered' John Banville James Wood is one of the leading critics of the age, and here, for the first time, are his selected essays. From the career-defining 'Hysterical Realism' to his more personal reflections on family, religion and sensibility, Serious Noticing offers a comprehensive overview of his writing over the last twenty years. These essays offer more than a viewpoint - they show how to bring the eye of critical reading to life as a whole. 'James Wood is one of literature's true lovers, and his deeply felt, contentious essays are thrilling in their reach and moral seriousness' Susan Sontag

This light-hearted but deeply researched book offers interest and guidance to walkers, social historians and lovers of the Bronte family; their lives and works. Set in and around the town of Haworth it gives a dual introduction to walkers and lovers of literature who can explore this unique area of Yorkshire and walk in the footsteps of those who knew and loved this town and its moorlands two hundred years ago. With guided tours around special buildings as well as outdoor walks and the history of people and places who lived and worked in Haworth over centuries, it offers an insight into life and death in the melee of the Industrial Revolution. Its joint authors have combined their lifelong interests in Victorian literature and social history with writing, walking, photography and cartography and have included quotes from Bronte poetry and novels.

Ralph F. Voss was a high school junior in Plainville, Kansas in mid-November of 1959 when four members of the Herbert Clutter family were murdered in Holcomb, Kansas, by "four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives," an unimaginable horror in a quiet farm community during the Eisenhower years. No one in Kansas or elsewhere could then have foreseen the emergence of Capote's book which has never gone out of print, has twice been made into a major motion picture, remains required reading in criminology, American Studies, sociology, and English classes, and has been the source of two recent biographical films. Voss examines Capote and In Cold Blood from many perspectives, not only as the crowning achievement of Capote's career, but also as a story in itself, focusing on Capote's artfully composed text, his extravagant claims for it as reportage, and its larger status in American popular culture. Voss argues that Capote's publication of In Cold Blood in 1966 forever transcended his reputation as a first-rate stylist but second-rate writer of "Southern gothic" fiction; that In Cold Blood actually is a gothic novel, a sophisticated culmination of Capote's artistic development and interest in lurid regionalism, but one that nonetheless eclipsed him both personally and artistically. He also explores Capote's famous claim that he created a genre called the "non-fiction novel," and its status as a foundational work of "true crime" writing as practiced by authors ranging from Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer to James Ellroy, Joe McGinniss, and John Berendt. Voss also examines Capote's artful manipulation of the story's facts and circumstances: his masking of crucial homoerotic elements to enhance its marketability; his need for the killers to remain alive long enough to get the story, and then his need for them to die so that he could complete it; and Capote's style, his shaping of the narrative, and his selection of details why it served him to include this and not that, and the effects of such choices all despite confident declarations that "every word is true." Though it's been nearly 50 years since the Clutter murders and far more gruesome crimes have been documented, In Cold Blood continues to resonate deeply in popular culture. Beyond questions of artistic selection and claims of truth, beyond questions about capital punishment and Capote's own post-publication dissolution, In Cold Blood's ongoing relevance stems, argues Voss, from its unmatched role as a touchstone for enduring issues of truth, exploitation, victimization, and the power of narrative.

A collection of original essays establishing how wide the intellectual boundaries of narrative theory have become The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories showcases the latest approaches to diverse narratives across many media and in numerous disciplines. Attending to literary, digital, visual, cinematic, televisual, and aural forms of storytelling, this book brings founders of the field of post-classical narrative theory together with senior and emerging scholars. This is the first anthology to consider what narrative is and what it can do in the wake of various turns in literary studies which have been appearing in the context of digital media and algorithmic capital. From mind-centred and philosophical approaches to theories focusing on gender, race, and sexuality, the chapters touch on poetry, drama, digital games, podcasts, coding, speculative fiction, the law, medical narrative, oral storytelling, and comics as well as the more traditional areas of fiction, TV, and film. This is the future of narrative theory. Key Features: Includes popular culture genres (comics, video games, coding) not covered in depth in other companions to narrative theory Showcases essays on narrative dimensions of law, medical ethics, linguistics, and philosophy as well as more obviously narrative genres Attention given to race, gender, sexuality distributed throughout the volume, not isolated in a single section New essays by superstars in narrative theory (Phelan, McHale, Lanser, Richardson, Abbott, Currie) as well as other well respected and emerging scholars