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Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works > Literary reference works
Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern
Literature, 1900-1965 argues for deeper consideration of the
complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites
throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such
experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this
group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against
people of color in America, individuals regarded as ""white trash""
have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various
white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as
grotesque and anxiety inducing, especially when they are aligned in
close proximity to blacks or to people with disabilities. Thus, as
a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various
iterations of the label (e.g., ""white trash,"" tenant farmers, or
even people with a little less money than average) have been
subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear,
and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary
critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies,
both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors
including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Sutton Griggs, Erskine
Caldwell, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor,
we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their
status, often by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize
people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the
auspices or boundaries of ""white trash.
Across the eighteenth century in Britain, readers, writers, and
theater-goers were fascinated by women who dressed in men's
clothing from actresses on stage who showed their shapely legs to
advantage in men's breeches to stories of valiant female soldiers
and ruthless female pirates. Spanning genres from plays, novels,
and poetry to pamphlets and broadsides, the cross-dressing woman
came to signal more than female independence or unconventional
behaviors; she also came to signal an investment in female same-sex
intimacies and sapphic desires. Sapphic Crossings reveals how
various British texts from the period associate female
cross-dressing with the exciting possibility of intimate, embodied
same-sex relationships. Ula Lukszo Klein reconsiders the role of
lesbian desires and their structuring through cross-gender
embodiments as crucial not only to the history of sexuality but to
the rise of modern concepts of gender, sexuality, and desire. She
prompts readers to rethink the roots of lesbianism and transgender
identities today and introduces new ways of thinking about embodied
sexuality in the past.
Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of
interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose
genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and
beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and
themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book
Award-winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is
also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and
humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright
Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and
she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association's first
Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and
Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities
(2013). Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in
this collection delve deeply into Howe's poetics, her innovative
critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and
her position on subjects ranging from the Lone Ranger to Native
American mascots. Two previously unpublished interviews, "'An
American in New York': LeAnne Howe" (2019) and "Genre-Sliding on
Stage with LeAnne Howe" (2020), explore unexamined areas of her
personal history and how it impacted her creative work, including
childhood trauma and her incubation as a playwright in the 1980s.
These conversations along with 2019's Occult Poetry Radio interview
also give important insights on the background of Howe's newest
critically acclaimed work, Savage Conversations (2019), about Mary
Todd Lincoln's hallucination of a "Savage Indian" during her time
in Bellevue Place sanitarium. Taken as a whole, Conversations with
LeAnne Howe showcases the development and continued impact of one
of the most important Indigenous American writers of the
twenty-first century.
Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South
for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association
and the reasons for its perseverance of ten seem unclear. Anthony
Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so
particular as the social habit of hospitality which is exercised
among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular
practices and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of
an entire region of the country. Historians have offered a variety
of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of
hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at
times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous
consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural
historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression
of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered
different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions
of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual
practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and
valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises
fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of
hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly
in light of the region's historical legacy of slavery and
segregation.
Contributes to the history of Middle Eastern narrative lore and its
impact on Western tradition.
This book presents rich information on Romanian mythology and
folklore, previously under-explored in Western scholarship, placing
the source material within its historical context and drawing
comparisons with European and Indo-European culture and
mythological tradition. The author presents a detailed comparative
study and argues that Romanian mythical motifs have roots in
Indo-European heritage, by analyzing and comparing mythical motifs
from the archaic cultures, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Sanskrit, and
Persian, with written material and folkloric data that reflects the
Indo-European culture. The book begins by outlining the history of
the Getae-Dacians, beginning with Herodotus' description of their
customs and beliefs in the supreme god Zamolxis, then moves to the
Roman wars and the Romanization process, before turning to recent
debates in linguistics and genetics regarding the provenance of a
shared language, religion, and culture in Europe. The author then
analyzes myth creation, its relation to rites, and its functions in
society, before examining specific examples of motifs and themes
from Romanian folk tales and songs. This book will be of interest
to students and scholars of folklore studies, comparative
mythology, linguistic anthropology, and European culture.
This interdisciplinary study explores how US Mexicana and Chicana
authors and artists across different historical periods and regions
use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Through
"negotiation"-a concept that accounts for artistic practices
outside the duality of resistance/accommodation-and
"self-fashioning," Marci R. McMahon demonstrates how the very sites
of domesticity are used to engage the many political and recurring
debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting Mexicanas and
Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today. Domestic
Negotiations covers a range of archival sources and cultural
productions, including the self-fashioning of the "chili queens" of
San Antonio, Texas, Jovita Gonzalez's romance novel Caballero , the
home economics career and cookbooks of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca,
Sandra Cisneros's "purple house controversy" and her acclaimed text
The House on Mango Street , Patssi Valdez's self-fashioning and
performance of domestic space in Asco and as a solo artist, Diane
Rodriguez's performance of domesticity in Hollywood television and
direction of domestic roles in theater, and Alma Lopez's digital
prints of domestic labor in Los Angeles. With intimate close
readings, McMahon shows how Mexicanas and Chicanas shape domestic
space to construct identities outside of gendered, racialized, and
xenophobic rhetoric.
In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of
writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth
and -twenty-first century American writers and artists each of whom
employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration.
Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies,
Wong argues that grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions
of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists
experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break
free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful
histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the
possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the
boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and
text. Wong considers eight writers-artists including comic-book
author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts;
and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows
how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by
historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new
possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word
and image.
The present English translation reproduces the original German of
Carl Brockelmann's Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur (GAL) as
accurately as possible. In the interest of user-friendliness the
following emendations have been made in the translation: Personal
names are written out in full, except b. for ibn; Brockelmann's
transliteration of Arabic has been adapted to comply with modern
standards for English-language publications; modern English
equivalents are given for place names, e.g. Damascus, Cairo,
Jerusalem, etc.; several erroneous dates have been corrected, and
the page references to the two German editions have been retained
in the margin, except in the Supplement volumes, where new
references to the first two English volumes have been inserted.
Understanding an epic story's key belief patterns can reveal
community-level values, the nature of familial bonds, and how
divine and human concerns jockey for power and influence. These
foundational motifs remain understudied as they relate to South
Asian folk legends, but are nonetheless crucial in shaping the
values exemplified by such stories' central heroes and heroines. In
Hidden Paradigms, anthropologist Brenda E.F. Beck describes The
Legend of Ponnivala, an oral epic from rural South India. Recorded
in 1965, this story was sung to a group of village enthusiasts by a
respected pair of local bards. This grand legend took more than 38
hours to complete over 18 nights. Bringing this unique example of
Tamil culture to the attention of an international audience, Beck
compares this virtually unknown South Indian epic to five other
culturally significant works - the Ojibwa Nanabush cycle, the
Mahabharata, an Icelandic Saga, the Bible, and the Epic of
Gilgamesh - establishing this foundational Tamil story as one that
engages with the same universal human struggles and themes present
throughout the world. Copiously illustrated, Hidden Paradigms
provides a fresh example of the power of comparative thinking,
offering a humanistic complement to scientific reasoning.
The Dark Tower series is the backbone of Stephen King's legendary
career. Eight books and more than three thousand pages make up this
bestselling fantasy epic. This revised and updated concordance,
incorporating the 2012 Dark Tower novel The Wind Through the
Keyhole, is the definitive encyclopedic reference book that
provides readers with everything they need to navigate their way
through the series. With hundreds of characters, Mid-World
geography, High Speech lexicon, and extensive cross-references,
this comprehensive handbook is essential for any Dark Tower fan.
Includes:
Characters and Genealogies
Magical Objects and Forces
Mid-World and Our World Places
Portals and Magical Places
Mid-, End-, and Our World Maps
Timeline for the Dark Tower Series
Mid-World Dialects
Mid-World Rhymes, Songs, and Prayers
Political and Cultural References
References to Stephen King's Own Work
Conversations with Jim Harrison, Revised and Updated offers a
judicious selection of interviews spanning the writing career of
Jim Harrison (1937-2016) from its beginnings in the 1960s to the
last interview he gave weeks before his death in March 2016.
Harrison labeled himself and lived as a ""quadra schizoid"" writer.
He worked in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and screenwriting, and he
published more than forty books that attracted an international
following. These interviews supply a lively narrative of his
progress as a major contemporary American author. This collection
showcases Harrison's pet peeves, his candor and humility, his sense
of humor, and his patience. He does not shy from his authorial
obsessions, especially his efforts to hone the novella, for which
he is considered a contemporary master, or the frequency with which
he defied polite narrative conventions and created memorable,
resolute female characters. Each conversation attests to the depth
and range of Harrison's considerable intellectual and political
preoccupations, his fierce social and ecological conscience, his
aesthetic beliefs, and his stylistic orientations in poetry and
prose.
Suitable for ages 10 and 11 (Year 6) Provides targeted questions
for grammar, punctuation and spelling Ideal for home learning and
additional practice outside of the classroom Answers included in
the back of the book Remember, revise and practise This bright,
colourful and easy to use write-in workbook makes it simple and fun
for Year 6 children to recap, revisit and reinforce what they've
learned about grammar, punctuation and spelling throughout Key
Stage 2. Its lively, friendly approach will test and strengthen
their knowledge as it recognises their achievements and gently
motivates further progress. Boost skills and build confidence An
engaging array of targeted exercises allow Year 6 children to test
their understanding of grammar, punctuation and spelling, practise
all their skills, cement their knowledge and feel positive and
confident about their ability to achieve and succeed. Get prepared
for test success! With SATs-style practice questions, vital
revision content that recaps what they've been learning in class,
tick boxes to mark their progress and full answers to check their
work, children will quickly begin to feel ready for success in the
tests.
In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in
Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna
Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the
color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories:
Mississippi through William Faulkner's work, Louisiana through
Ernest Gaines's novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and
Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by
Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature
exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US
democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century,
revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the
transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into
neocolonial reconfigurations. A result of systemic inequality and
large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal
the ways in which private relations can reflect national
occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny.
Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing
that persist in current legal, economic, and political
infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to
light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of
the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law
systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724
Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in
tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing
Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space
for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and
variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity
of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into
accounts of the past.
This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of
academic writing and information literacy in a new digital
dimension, drawing on recent trends towards project-based writing,
digital writing and multimodal writing in Education, and
synthesising theory with practice to provide a handy toolkit for
teachers and researchers. The author combines a practical
orientation to teaching academic writing and information literacy
with a grounding in current theories of writing instruction in the
digitalized era, and argue that as digital environments become more
universal in modern society - particularly in the aftermath of the
coronavirus pandemic - the lines between traditional academic
writing and multi-modal digital writing must necessary become
blurred. This book will be of use to teachers and instructors of
academic writing and information literacy, particularly within the
context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), as well as students
and researchers in Applied Linguistics, Pedagogy and Digital
Writing.
At once criminal and savior, clown and creator, antagonist and
mediator, the character of trickster has made frequent appearances
in works by writers the world over. As Margaret Atwood observed,
trickster gods ""stand where the door swings open on its hinges and
the horizon expands; they operate where things are joined together
and, thus, can also fall apart."" A shaping force in American
literature, trickster has appeared in such characters as
Huckleberry Finn, Rinehart, Sula, and Nanapush. Usually a figure
both culturally specific and transcendent, trickster leads the way
to the unconscious, the concealed, and the seemingly unattainable.
Trickster Lives offers thirteen new and challenging interpretations
of trickster in American writing, including essays on works by
African American, Native American, Pacific Rim, and Latino writers,
as well as an examination of trickster politics. This innovative
collection of work conveys the trickster's unmistakable imprint on
the modern world.
The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of
Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to
move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that
provides a literary analysis of Cobain's creative writings, Arthur
Flannigan Saint-Aubin's The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain's
Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and
songs crafted by Nirvana's iconic front man from the perspective of
cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics. Drawing on critiques
and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by feminist, queer, and
antiracist scholars, Saint-Aubin considers the literary means by
which Cobain creates the persona of a young, white, heterosexual
man who expresses masochistic and melancholic behaviors. On the one
hand, this individual welcomes pain and humiliation as atonement
for unpardonable sins; on the other, he experiences a profound
sense of loss and grief, seeking death as the ultimate act of
pleasure. The first-person narrators and characters that populate
Cobain's texts underscore the political and aesthetic repercussions
of his art. Cobain's distinctive version of grunge, understood as a
subculture, a literary genre, and a cultural practice, represents a
specific performance of race and gender, one that facilitates an
understanding of the self as part of a larger social order.
Saint-Aubin approaches Cobain's writings independently of the
artist's biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of
postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century
American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European
Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a
relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In
turn, through Saint-Aubin's elegant analysis, Cobain's creative
writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within
psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of
masculinity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive. By
foregrounding Cobain's ability to challenge coextensive links
between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals
how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon's
works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and
perform antiracist critiques of American culture.
Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547) was the genre-defining secular woman
writer of Renaissance Italy, whose literary model helped to
establish a decorous and wholly assimilated voice for women within
the field of Italian literature. The Companion to Vittoria Colonna
brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of
leading scholars to assess Colonna's contribution, both as a
writer, a role model, and a contributor to important religious
debates of the era. This book, while amply fulfilling the remit of
providing a useful and comprehensive handbook to meet the needs of
students and scholars at earlier and advanced levels, aims in
addition to do more than this, by drawing into a single volume for
the first time scholarship from across disciplines in which
Vittoria Colonna's influence has been felt, including literary
criticism, religious history, history of art and music.
Contributors are: Abigail Brundin, Stephen Bowd, Emidio Campi,
Eleonora Carinci, Adriana Chemello, Virginia Cox, Tatiana Crivelli,
Maria Forcellino, Gaudenz Freuler, Anne Piejus, Diana Robin, Helena
Sanson, and Maria Serena Sapegno.
Millions of southerners left the South in the twentieth century in
a mass migration that has, in many ways, rewoven the fabric of
American society on cultural, political, and economic levels.
Because the movements of southerners-and people in general-are
controlled not only by physical boundaries marked on a map but also
by narratives that define movement, narrative is central in
building and sustaining borders and in breaking them down. In
Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of
Southern Identity, author Mary Weaks-Baxter analyzes narratives by
and about those who left the South and how those narratives have
remade what it means to be southern. Drawing from a broad range of
narratives, including literature, newspaper articles, art, and
music, Weaks-Baxter outlines how these displacement narratives
challenged concepts of southern nationhood and redefined southern
identity. Close attention is paid to how depictions of the South,
particularly in the media and popular culture, prompted southerners
to leave the region and changed perceptions of southerners to
outsiders as well as how southerners saw themselves. Through an
examination of narrative, Weaks-Baxter reveals the profound effect
gender, race, and class have on the nature of the migrant's
journey, the adjustment of the migrant, and the ultimate decision
of the migrant either to stay put or return home, and connects the
history of border crossings to the issues being considered in
today's national landscape.
Conversations with Donald Hall offers a unique glimpse into the
creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor,
anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Hall's
evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a
period of more than sixty years. Donald Hall (1928-2018) reveals
vivid, funny, and moving anecdotes about T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,
and the sculptor Henry Moore; he talks about his excitement on his
return to New Hampshire and the joys of his marriage with Jane
Kenyon; and he candidly discusses his loss and grief when Kenyon
died in 1995 at the age of forty-seven. The thirteen interviews
range from a detailed exploration of the composition of ""Ox Cart
Man"" to the poems that make up Without, an almost unbearable
poetry of grief that was written following Jane Kenyon's death. The
book also follows Hall into old age, when he turned to essay
writing and the reflections on aging that make up Essays after
Eighty. This moving and insightful collection of interviews is
crucial for anyone interested in poetry and the creative process,
the techniques and achievements of modern American poetry, and the
elusive psychology of creativity and loss.
The critical condition and historical motivation behind Time
Studies The concept of time in the post-millennial age is
undergoing a radical rethinking within the humanities. Time: A
Vocabulary of the Present newly theorizes our experiences of time
in relation to developments in post-1945 cultural theory and arts
practices. Wide ranging and theoretically provocative, the volume
introduces readers to cutting-edge temporal conceptualizations and
investigates what exactly constitutes the scope of time studies.
Featuring twenty essays that reveal what we talk about when we talk
about time today, especially in the areas of history, measurement,
and culture, each essay pairs two keywords to explore the tension
and nuances between them, from "past/future" and
"anticipation/unexpected" to "extinction/adaptation" and
"serial/simultaneous." Moving beyond the truisms of postmodernism,
the collection newly theorizes the meanings of temporality in
relationship to aesthetic, cultural, technological, and economic
developments in the postwar period. This book thus assumes that
time-not space, as the postmoderns had it-is central to the
contemporary period, and that through it we can come to terms with
what contemporaneity can be for human beings caught up in the
historical present. In the end, Time reveals that the present is a
cultural matrix in which overlapping temporalities condition and
compete for our attention. Thus each pair of terms presents two
temporalities, yielding a generative account of the time, or times,
in which we live.
The Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the
Final Judgment: the Apocalypse is central to Christianity and has
evolved throughout Christianity's long history. Thus, when
ecclesiastics brought the Apocalypse to Indigenous audiences in the
Americas, both groups adapted it further, reflecting new political
and social circumstances. The religious texts in Aztec and Maya
Apocalypses, many translated for the first time, provide an
intriguing picture of this process-revealing the influence of
European, Aztec, and Maya worldviews on portrayals of Doomsday by
Spanish priests and Indigenous authors alike. The Apocalypse and
Christian eschatology played an important role in the conversion of
the Indigenous population and often appeared in the texts and
sermons composed for their consumption. Through these writings from
the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century-priests' "official"
texts and Indigenous authors' rendering of them-Mark Z. Christensen
traces Maya and Nahua influences, both stylistic and substantive,
while documenting how extensively Old World content and meaning
were absorbed into Indigenous texts. Visions of world endings and
beginnings were not new to the Indigenous cultures of America.
Christensen shows how and why certain formulations, such as the
Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, found receptive audiences among the Maya
and the Aztec, with religious ramifications extending to the
present day. These translated texts provide the opportunity to see
firsthand the negotiations that ecclesiastics and natives engaged
in when composing their eschatological treatises. With their
insights into how various ecclesiastics, Nahuas, and Mayas
preached, and even understood, Catholicism, they offer a uniquely
detailed, deeply informed perspective on the process of forming
colonial religion.
Reading These United States explores the relationship between early
American literature and federalism in the early decades of the
republic. As a federal republic, the United States constituted an
unusual model of national unity, defined by the representation of
its variety rather than its similarities. Taking the federal
structure of the nation as a foundational point, Keri Holt examines
how popular print?including almanacs, magazines, satires, novels,
and captivity narratives?encouraged citizens to recognize and
accept the United States as a union of differences. Challenging the
prevailing view that early American print culture drew citizens
together by establishing common bonds of language, sentiment, and
experience, she argues that early American literature helped define
the nation, paradoxically, by drawing citizens apart?foregrounding,
rather than transcending, the regional, social, and political
differences that have long been assumed to separate them. The book
offers a new approach for studying print nationalism that
transforms existing arguments about the political and cultural
function of print in the early United States, while also offering a
provocative model for revising the concept of the nation itself.
Holt also breaks new ground by incorporating an analysis of
literature into studies of federalism and connects the literary
politics of the early republic with antebellum literary politics?a
bridge scholars often struggle to cross.
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