This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew's body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women's writing, the book argues that materiality also embodies fictional constructions that should be approached as a culture-specific material-semiotic interface.

From Occitan poetry to Francophone writing produced in the Caribbean and North Africa, from intellectual history to current films, and from medieval manuscripts to bandes dessinees, this History covers French literature from its beginnings to the present day. With equal attention to all genres, historical periods and registers, this is the most comprehensive guide to literature written in French ever produced in English, and the first in decades to offer such an array of topics and perspectives. Contributors attend to issues of orality, history, peripheries, visual culture, alterity, sexuality, religion, politics, autobiography and testimony. The result is a collection that, despite the wide variety of topics and perspectives, presents a unified view of the richness of French-speaking cultures. This History gives support to the idea that French writing will continue to prosper in the twenty-first century as it adapts, adds to, and refocuses the rich legacy of its past.

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, with marginal notes and explanations and full descriptions of each character.

Contributions by Alice Knox Eaton, Mar Gallego, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Shirley A. Stave, Justine Tally, Susana Vega-Gonzalez, and Anissa WardiIn her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison returned to several of the signature themes explored in her previous work: pernicious beauty standards for women, particularly African American women; mother-child relationships; racism and colorism; and child sexual abuse. God Help the Child, published in 2015, is set in the contemporary period, unlike all of her previous novels. The contemporary setting is ultimately incidental to the project of the novel, however; as with Morrison's other work, the story takes on mythic qualities, and the larger-than-life themes lend themselves to allegorical and symbolic readings that resonate in light of both contemporary and historical issues. New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's "God Help the Child": Race, Culture, and History, a collection of eight essays by both seasoned Morrison scholars as well as new and rising scholars, takes on the novel in a nuanced and insightful analysis, interpreting the novel in relation to Morrison's earlier work as well as locating it within ongoing debates in literary and other academic disciplines engaged with African American literature. The volume is divided into three sections. The first focuses on trauma - both the pain and suffering caused by neglect and abuse, as well as healing and understanding. The second section considers narrative choices, concentrating on experimentation and reader engagement. The third section turns a comparative eye to Morrison's fictional canon, from her debut work of fiction, The Bluest Eye, until the present. These essays build on previous studies of Morrison's novels and deepen readers'understanding of both her last novel and her larger literary output.

This book is among the very few publications offering to the English-speaking readership significant insights into contemporary Lithuanian folklore research. Dealing with broad variety of materials-from archived manuscripts to audio-recorded life stories to internet folklore, it comprises such topics as history and identity, traditional worldview influencing modern people's actions, construction of the mental landscape, types and modes of storytelling, the modern uses of proverbs, anecdotes, and internet lore. In a balanced way reflecting upon past and present, tradition and modernity, individual and collective, and employing modern research methodologies to dissect and analyze popular subjects and themes, the eight separate essays comprising the book present a condensed view of the popular Lithuanian culture and mentality.

This volume collects the critical prose of award-winning writer Anna Frajlich. The Ghost of Shakespeare takes its name from Frajlich's essay on Nobel Prize laureate Wislawa Szymborska, but informs her approach as a comparativist more generally as she considers the work of major Polish writers of the twentieth century, including Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, and Bruno Schulz. Frajlich's study of the Roman theme in Russian Symbolism owes its origins to her stay in the Eternal City, the second stop on her exile from Poland in 1969. The book concludes with essays in autobiography that describe her parents' dramatic flight from Poland at the outbreak of the war, her own exile from Poland in 1969, settling in New York City, and building her career as a scholar and leading poet of her generation.

Reading James Joyce is a ready-at-hand compendium and all-encompassing interpretive guide designed for teachers and students approaching Joyce's writings for the first time, guiding readers to better understand Joyce's works and the background from which they emerged. Meticulously organized, this text situates readers within the world of Joyce including biographical exploration, discussion of Joyce's innovations and prominent works such as Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, surveys of significant critical approaches to Joyce's writings, and examples of alternative readings and contemporary responses. Each chapter will provide interpretive approaches to contemporary literary theories and key issues, including end-of-chapter strategies and extended readings for further engagement. This book also includes shorter assessments of Joyce's lesser-known works-critical writings, drama, poetry, letters, epiphanies, and personal recollections-to contextualize the creative and social environments from which his most notable publications arose. This uniquely comprehensive guide to Joyce will be an invaluable and comprehensive resource for readers exploring the influential world of Joyce studies.

Reading James Joyce is a ready-at-hand compendium and all-encompassing interpretive guide designed for teachers and students approaching Joyce's writings for the first time, guiding readers to better understand Joyce's works and the background from which they emerged. Meticulously organized, this text situates readers within the world of Joyce including biographical exploration, discussion of Joyce's innovations and prominent works such as Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, surveys of significant critical approaches to Joyce's writings, and examples of alternative readings and contemporary responses. Each chapter will provide interpretive approaches to contemporary literary theories and key issues, including end-of-chapter strategies and extended readings for further engagement. This book also includes shorter assessments of Joyce's lesser-known works-critical writings, drama, poetry, letters, epiphanies, and personal recollections-to contextualize the creative and social environments from which his most notable publications arose. This uniquely comprehensive guide to Joyce will be an invaluable and comprehensive resource for readers exploring the influential world of Joyce studies.

Thomas C. Foster's classic guide--a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes, and contexts--shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps readers discover the deeper meanings of novels, poems, and plays by looking at literature with the eyes--and literary codes--of the ultimate professional reader: the college professor. This revised and updated edition contains new chapters, new preface and epilogue, and updated teaching points developed over the last decade.

What does it mean when a literary hero travels along a dusty road? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower? Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature--a world where a road leads to a quest and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower--and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.

This book, first published in 1988, reveals the great care Dickens took with the planning and preparation of A Tale of Two Cities and its roots. It also explores the aspects of Dickens's life, especially his interest in private theatricals, which contributed to the genesis of the novel. For the first time the historical sources for the very individual account of the French Revolution presented in A Tale of Two Cities are examined, and the book investigates the novelist's debt to French and English eye-witnesses. This Companion identifies the multitude of allusions to what Dickens often regarded as the whims of eighteenth-century justice, religion, philosophy, fashion and society. It provides the modern reader with both fundamental sources of information and a fascinating account of the creation of a complex historical novel.

This book, first published in 1988, is the most comprehensive annotation of Bleak House ever undertaken. It provides authoritative background information about the topical issues of the novel that interested Dickens as a social critic and activist. It also describes the novel's literary antecedents and identifies the sources of its hundreds of literary and historical allusions. The annotation is based on a wide range of nineteenth-century sources - from newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary papers to travel guides and cookery books - and gives the modern reader unprecedented access to both Bleak House - Dickens's tract for the times - and the period when it was written.

Walt Whitman created, in various editions of Leaves of Grass, what is arguably the most influential book of poems anywhere in the past 200 years. Whitman absorbed the world, transmuting it into poems that address a spectrum of topics--from democracy and religion to sexuality, gender, class, and identity. He exuberantly incarnated his epoch at the same time as he invoked "you"-- readers and "poets to come"--to join in a "poetry of the future." The first A to Z Whitman reference to incorporate 21st century scholarship, this work is ideal for readers who want a concise introduction to the major poems and prose and to the people, places, and topics central to his life. Each of the book's 142 entries is followed by cross-references to related entries and suggestions for further reading. Also included are a brief biography, a chronology of Whitman's life and major works, and a bibliography of some 300 primary and secondary sources on this most timeless and contemporary of poets.

This book details a study of sign language brokering that is carried out by deaf and hearing people who grow up using sign language at home with deaf parents, known as heritage signers. Child language brokering (CLB) is a form of interpreting carried out informally by children, typically for migrant families. The study of sign language brokering has been largely absent from the emerging body of CLB literature. The book gives an overview of the international, multi-stage, mixed-method study employing an online survey, semi-structured interviews and visual methods, to explore the lived experiences of deaf parents and heritage signers. It will be of interest to practitioners and academics working with signing deaf communities and those who wish to pursue professional practice with deaf communities, as well as academics and students in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, Interpreting Studies and the Social Science of Childhood.

Ordinary Masochisms reveals how literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently challenged the prevailing view of masochism as a deviant behavior, an opinion supported by many sexologists and psychoanalysts in the 1800s. In these texts, Jennifer Mitchell highlights everyday examples of characters deriving pleasure from pain in encounters and emotions such as flirtations, courtships, betrothals, lesbian desires, religious zeal, marital relationships, and affairs.Mitchell begins by examining the archetypal tale of Samson and Delilah together with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, from which masochism gets its name. Through close readings, Mitchell then argues that Charlotte Bronte's Villette, George Moore's A Drama in Muslin, D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, and Jean Rhys's Quartet all experiment with masochistic relationships that are more complex than they seem. Mitchell shows that, far from being victimized, the characters in these works achieve self-definition and empowerment by pursuing and performing pain and that masochism is a generative response rather than a destructive force beyond their control. Including readings of Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden and Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers, Mitchell traces shifts in public consciousness regarding sex and gender and discusses why masochism continues to be categorized as a perversion today. The literary world, she asserts, has repeatedly questioned this notion as well as masochism's associations with passivity and femininity, using the behavior to defy heteronormative and heteropatriarchal gender dynamics.

The Blackademic Life critically examines academic fictions produced by black writers. In it, Lavelle Porter evaluates the depiction of academic and campus life in literature as a space for black writers to produce counternarratives that celebrate the potentials of black intelligence and argue for the importance of black higher education, particularly in the humanistic tradition. Beginning with an examination of W. E. B. Du Bois's creative writing as the source of the first black academic novels, Porter looks at the fictional representations of black intellectual life and the expectations that are placed on faculty and students to be racial representatives and spokespersons, whether or not they ever intended to be. The final chapter examines blackademics on stage and screen, including in the 2014 academic film Dear White People and the groundbreaking television series A Different World.

Critics have routinely excluded African American literature from ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has, from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni Morrison's work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate's novels and brings to the fore an unequaled engagement between race and nature. Morrison's ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere are central to this analysis. They highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home; bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula and God Help the Child. By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.

A young imperialist adventurer turned hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, Norwegian journalist, poet, and playwright Nordahl Grieg has become more of a national legend than a real person since his death as a war reporter in Berlin in 1943. A look into Grieg's intellectual development during the dynamic interwar period sheds light on the political and cultural ideologies that competed in a turbulent Europe. Often portrayed with an emphasis on his humanist and pacifist positions, this antifascist figure becomes more complex in his writings, which reveal shifting allegiances, including an unsavory period as a rigid Stalinist. In this comprehensive and accessible book, Dean Krouk examines a significant public figure in Scandinavian literature and a critical period in modern European history through original readings of the political, ethical, and gender issues in Grieg's works. This volume offers a first-rate analysis of the interwar period's political and cultural agendas in Scandinavia and Europe leading to the Second World War by examining the rise of fascism, communism, and antifascism. Grieg's poetry found renewed resonance in Norway following the 2011 far-right domestic terrorist attacks, making insight into his contradictory ideas more crucial than ever. Krouk's presentation of Grieg's unexpected ideological tensions will be thought-provoking for many readers in the United States and elsewhere.

With a Preface and biographies from Jack Zipes, as well as the original illustrations by Violet Brunton, this collection of fairy tales originally published by the award-winning Romer Wilson - Green Magic (1928), Silver Magic (1929), and Red Magic (1930) - offers a combination of classic fairy tales, alongside lesser known, global and diverse tales. Silver Magic contains classic fairy tales including "Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," and Hawthorne's "The Miraculous Pitcher," as well as several anonymous and previously undiscovered tales such as "Lohengrin." It was Romer Wilson's intention to combine the familiar with the unknown, and to introduce authors and cultures from a variety of countries. As a researcher, Wilson uncovered a remarkable amount of stories from other countries that remain unknown today. This collection gives voice to unique and intriguing tales that inspire children to have a better understanding of how people and their stories are alike despite major differences. Through his Preface and commentary, Jack Zipes shows how all three books are a means to bring people together in the name of peace and justice. These books will, therefore, be of interest to anyone researching or studying fairy tales, folklore and children's literature, as well as global or comparative literature and social justice.

With a Preface and biographies from Jack Zipes, as well as the original illustrations by Violet Brunton, this collection of fairy tales originally published by the award-winning Romer Wilson - Green Magic (1928), Silver Magic (1929), and Red Magic (1930) - offers a combination of classic fairy tales, alongside lesser-known, global and diverse tales. Green Magic contains many traditional fairy tales, including "Rapunzel" by Grimm, "Ali Baba" by Diyab and Galland, and "Puss in Boots" by Perrault, as well as previously unknown tales, such as "The Golden Twins" by Iperescu and "The Brotherless Girl" by an anonymous author. It was Romer Wilson's intention to combine the familiar with the unknown, and introduce authors and cultures from a variety of countries. As a researcher, she uncovered a remarkable amount of stories from other countries that remain unknown today. The collection gives voice to unique and intriguing tales that inspire children to have a better understanding of how people and their stories are alike despite major differences. Through his Preface and commentary, Jack Zipes shows how all three books are a means to bring people together in the name of peace and justice. These books will therefore be of interest to anyone researching or studying fairy tales, folklore, and children's literature, as well as global or comparative literature and social justice.

Literary critics and authors have long argued about the importance or unimportance of an author's relationship to readers. What can be said about the rhetorical relationship that exists between author and reader? How do authors manipulate character, specifically, to modulate the emotional appeal of character so a reader will feel empathy, awe, even delight? In At Arm's Length: A Rhetoric of Character in Children's and Young Adult Literature, Mike Cadden takes a rhetorical approach that complements structural, affective, and cognitive readings. The study offers a detailed examination of the ways authorial choice results in emotional invitation. Cadden sounds the modulation of characters along a continuum from those larger than life and awe inspiring to the life-sized and empathetic, down to the pitiable and ridiculous, and all those spaces between. Cadden examines how authors alternate between holding the young reader at arm's length from and drawing them into emotional intensity. This balance and modulation are key to a rhetorical understanding of character in literature, film, and television for the young. Written in accessible language and of interest and use to undergraduates and seasoned critics, At Arm's Length provides a broad analysis of stories for the young child and young adult, in book, film, and television. Throughout, Cadden touches on important topics in children's literature studies, including the role of safety in children's media, as well as character in multicultural and diverse literature. In addition to treating ""traditional"" works, he analyzes special cases-forms, including picture books, verse novels, and graphic novels, and modes like comedy, romance, and tragedy.

While students and general readers typically cannot relate to esoteric definitions of science fiction, they readily understand the genre as a literature that characteristically deals with subjects such as new inventions, space, robot and aliens. This book looks at science fiction in precisely this manner, with twenty-one chapters that each deal with a subject that is repeatedly addressed in science fiction of recent centuries. Based on a packet of original essays that the author assembled for his classes, the book could serve as a supplemental textbook in science fiction classes, but also contains material of interest to science fiction scholars and others devoted to the genre. In some cases, chapters offer thorough surveys of numerous works involving certain subjects, such as imagined vehicles, journeys beneath the Earth and undersea adventures, discovering intriguing patterns in the ways that various writers developed their ideas. When comprehensive coverage of ubiquitous topics such as robots, aliens and the planet Mars is impossible, chapters focus on major themes referencing selected texts. A conclusion discusses other science fiction subjects that were omitted for various reasons, and a bibliography lists additional resources for the study of science fiction in general and the topics of each chapter.

The only dictionary of its kind, this greatly expanded second edition lists objects, concepts, traits and situations ancient and modern and gives their appropriate symbols. A companion to Symbolism: A Comprehensive Dictionary (2012), this volume presents symbols and their referents in reverse association (but is not simply a reconfiguring of information). Examples: a symbol for "hell" is descending stairs; an attribute of Saint Benedict is a raven; joy after sorrow is signified by the gemstone amber. Ethnic, literary, artistic, religious, heraldic, numerological, folkloric, occult and psychological usages are included.

Elizabeth Ham's 1845 novel, The Ford Family in Ireland, provides a snapshot, based on the personal experiences of the author, of a pivotal period in that country's history. It examines the state of Ireland following the failed rebellions of 1798 and 1803 with a focus on the uprising of the "Thrashers," an agrarian society in Ireland, and their putting down by martial law. Such movements attempted to avenge the wrongs which they perceived were being carried out against the natives of Ireland by landowners and the English government. This rare novel, alongside extensive editorial commentary, will be of much interest to students of literature and Irish history.

This book examines the striking resurgence of the literary letter at the end of the long twentieth century. It explores how authors returned to epistolary conventions to create dialogue across national, linguistic and cultural borders and repositions a range of contemporary and postcolonial authors never considered together before, including Monica Ali, John Berger, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Walker. Through a series of situated readings, the book shows how the return to epistolarity is underpinned by ideals relating to dialogue and human connection. Several of the works use letters to present non-anglophone material to the anglophone reader. Others use letters to challenge policed borders: the prison, occupied territory, the nation state. Elsewhere, letters are used to connect correspondents in different cultural and linguistic contexts. Common to all of the works considered in this book is the appeal that they make to us, as readers, and the responsibility they place on us to respond to this address. By taking the epistle as its starting point and pursuing Auerbach's speculative ideal of weltliteratur, this book turns away from the dominant trend of 'distant reading' in world literature, and shows that it is in the close situated analysis of form and composition that the concept of world literature emerges most clearly. This study seeks to re-think the ways in which we read world literature and shows how the literary letter, in old and new forms, speaks powerfully again in this period.

When Angela Davis (b. 1944) was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 1970 and after she successfully gained acquittal in the 1972 trial that garnered national and international attention, she became one of the most recognizable and iconic figures in the twentieth century. An outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, she has written extensively about the intersections between race, class, and gender; Black liberation; and the US prison system. Conversations with Angela Davis seeks to explore Davis's role as an educator, scholar, and activist who continues to engage in important and significant social justice work. Featuring seventeen interviews ranging from the 1970s to the present day, the volume chronicles Davis's life and her involvement with and influence on important and significant historical and cultural events. Davis comments on a range of topics relevant to social, economic, and political issues from national and international contexts, and taken together, the interviews explore how her views have evolved over the past several decades. The volume provides insight on Davis's relationships with such organizations as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Communist Party, the Green Party, and Critical Resistance, and how Davis has fought for racial, gender, and social and economic equality in the US and abroad. Conversations with Angela Davis also addresses her ongoing work in the prison abolition movement.