This volume celebrates the contribution of Professor Colin Williams, an immensely important and influential scholar in the field of language policy for more than forty years. Eighteen chapters by former students, colleagues and collaborators address a range of topics involving different aspects of language legislation and language rights, governance, economics, territoriality, land use planning, and onomastics. Six chapters address policy issues in Professor Williams's native Wales while others focus on Canada, Catalonia, Ireland and Scotland. The volume concludes with an Afterword by Professor Williams himself. The book will be suitable for postgraduates and researchers not only in the field of language policy and planning but also sociolinguistics, geography, law and political science.

This volume of fourteen interviews covers the prolific and rich career of author Jerome Charyn (b. 1937). Four of the interviews appear in English for the first time, and two interviews appear here in print for the first time as well. As one of his autobiographical volumes claims, Jerome Charyn is a ""Bronx Boy,"" a child born from immigrant parents who went through Ellis Island in the 1920s like so many other travelers without luggage, a ""little werewolf"" who grew up on his own in the chaos of the Bronx ghetto. ""I think I was defined by two things: World War Two and the movies."" His work remains deeply marked by this childhood largely forgotten by the American Dream. If Charyn has spent much of his life in Paris, he has paradoxically never left the Bronx: ""'El Bronx' is there inside my head, and I revisit it the way Hemingway would fish the Big Two-Hearted River in his dreams."" His whole work is a long attempt at evoking his own history and celebrating his lifelong marveling at the power of language--""our second skin""--as well as his deep, unflinching belief in the promises of fiction. Since 1964, Charyn has published more than fifty books ranging from fiction to nonfiction and including short stories, very popular crime novels, graphic novels co-written with European artists, essays on American culture and cinema as well as on New York, autobiography and biography--an ever-changing production that has made it difficult for critics to classify him. And yet in many ways Charyn's writing thrives on constant currents: the words ""voice,"" ""song,"" ""undersong,"" or ""rhythm"" return frequently in his interviews as he explains what literature is to him and ceaselessly asserts that he is trying ""to find a music for a musicless world,"" a language for ""people who cannot speak.""

"Conversations with Steve Martin" presents a collection of interviews and profiles that focus on Martin as a writer, artist, and original thinker over the course of more than four decades in show business. While those less familiar with his full body of work may think of Martin as primarily the "wild and crazy guy" with an arrow through his head, this book makes the case that he is in fact one of our nation's most accomplished and varied artists. It shows the full range of Martin's creative work, tracing the source of his comic imagination from his early standup days, starting in the mid to late 1960s through the films he has written and starred in, and emphasizing his more recent creative outpourings as playwright, essayist, novelist, memoirist, songwriter, composer, musician, and art critic.

"Standup is the hardest material in the world to write for someone else; it's like trying to condense 10 years of experience into 20 minutes of new material.," Martin says. But commenting on his fiction writing, he says. "I think you have to be able to find as a writer that state where you don't know what you're going to say or what the character is going to say or who the characters are. That's the biggest thrill of all. When you start to trust that subconscious thing and you don't censor yourself--just remember you can always throw it away--that's when the good stuff comes out."

The selected materials consist not only of pieces focused primarily on Martin's writings, but also broader profiles and conversations that help explain Martin's development as a writer within the larger context of his many other accomplishments, talents, and performance skills.

In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau showcases the passion that made him a critic-his love for the written word. Many selections address music, from blackface minstrelsy to punk and hip-hop, artists from Lead Belly to Patti Smith, and fellow critics from Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs to Nelson George and Jessica Hopper. But Book Reports also teases out the popular in the Bible and 1984 as well as pornography and science fiction, and analyzes at length the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, the detective novels of Walter Mosley, the history of bohemia, and the 2008 financial crisis. It establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America's most insightful cultural critics as well.

This volume in the Arthurian Characters and Themes series treats the fascinating character of Perceval, the naive and flawed but gifted youth who becomes the Grail hero in some texts and yet is eclipsed in others by Galahad. Also includes eight musical examples.

"Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning" boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author's literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production "Desdemona" and her tenth and latest novel, "Home." These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of "Desdemona" and "Home" within the wider scope of Morrison's career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison's fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in "Home."

In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature represented by Morrison's focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from "Home," and framed by two poems: Rita Dove's "The Buckeye" and Sonia Sanchez's "Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo."

Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text collects eleven essays in which contributors query the status of Faulkner's literary text in contemporary criticism and scholarship. How do scholars today approach Faulkner's texts? For some, including Arthur F. Kinney and James B. Carothers, ""returns of the text"" is a phrase that raises questions of aesthetics, poetics, and authority. For others, the phrase serves as an invitation to return to Faulkner's language, to writing and the letter itself. Serena Blount, Owen Robinson, James Harding, and Taylor Hagood interpret ""returns of the text"" in the sense in which Roland Barthes characterizes this shift in his seminal essay ""From Work to Text."" Faulkner's language itself is under close scrutiny in some of the readings that emphasize a deconstructive or a semiological approach to his writing. Historical and cultural contexts continue to play significant roles, however, in many of the essays such as those by Thadious Davis, Ted Atkinson, Martyn Bone, and Ethel Young-Minor. Instead of approaching the literary text as a reflection, a representation of that context, these readings stress the role of the text as a challenge to the power of external ideological systems. By retaining a bond with new historicist analysis and cultural studies, these essays are illustrative of a kind of analysis that carefully preserves attention to Faulkner's sociopolitical environment. The concluding essay by Theresa M. Towner issues an invitation to return to Faulkner's less well-known short stories for critical exposure and the pleasure of reading.

Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein's constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein's ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience. Combing through Stein's scholastic writings, drafting notebooks, and literary works, Feinstein analyzes references to Judaism that have puzzled scholars. She reveals the never-before-discussed influence of Matthew Arnold as well as a hidden Jewish framework in Stein's epic novel The Making of Americans. In Stein's experimental "voices" poems, Feinstein identifies an explicitly Jewish vocabulary that expresses themes of marriage, nationalism, and Zionism. She also shows how Wars I Have Seen, written in Vichy France during World War II, compare the experience of wartime occupation with the historic persecution of Jews.Affirming the importance of Jewish identity and modernist style to Gertrude Stein's legacy as a writer, this book radically changes the way we read and appreciate Stein's work.

Every bookshop has a story.

We're not talking about rooms that are just full of books. We're talking about bookshops in barns, disused factories, converted churches and underground car parks. Bookshops on boats, on buses, and in old run-down train stations. Fold-out bookshops, undercover bookshops, this-is-the-best-place-I've-ever-been-to-bookshops.

Meet Sarah and her Book Barge sailing across the sea to France; meet Sebastien, in Mongolia, who sells books to herders of the Altai mountains; meet the bookshop in Canada that's invented the world's first antiquarian book vending machine. And that's just the beginning.

From the oldest bookshop in the world, to the smallest you could imagine, The Bookshop Book examines the history of books, talks to authors about their favourite places, and looks at over three hundred weirdly wonderful bookshops across six continents (sadly, we've yet to build a bookshop down in the South Pole).

The Bookshop Book is a love letter to bookshops all around the world.

Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.

Hardy's second published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), the first of his great series of Wessex novels, was originally published anonymously. As part of the Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy, this edition of the novel provides readers with an authoritative and accurate text of the novel; moreover it gives access to every revision that Hardy made, and to notations of all the errors introduced by printers' compositors. The annotated text is surrounded by an introduction that gives a very full account of the genesis, the writing and the publishing history of the novel. A range of appendices and comprehensive explanatory notes explore significant aspects of the composition, production and marketing of the novel, touched on in the introduction, to provide a full understanding of the nature and life of this classic work.

This volume lists the work produced on anglophone black African literature between 1997 and 1999. This bibliographic work is a continuation of the highly acclaimed earlier volumes compiled by Bernth Lindfors. Containing about 10,000 entries, some of which are annotated to identify the authors discussed, it covers books, periodical articles, papers in edited collections and selective coverage of other relevant sources.

New perspectives on women's contributions to periodical culture in the era of modernism This collection highlights the contributions of women writers, editors and critics to periodical culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores women's role in shaping conversations about modernism and modernity across varied aesthetic and ideological registers, and foregrounds how such participation was shaped by a wide range of periodical genres. The essays focus on well-known publications and introduce those as yet obscure and understudied -- including middlebrow and popular magazines, movement-based, radical papers, avant-garde titles and classic Little Magazines. Examining neglected figures and shining new light on familiar ones, the collection enriches our understanding of the role women played in the print culture of this transformative period. Key Features Helps recover neglected women writers and cast new light on canonical ones Highlights the geographical diversity of modern British print culture Emphasises the interdisciplinary nature of modernism, including essays on modernist dance, music, cinema, drama and architecture Includes a section on social movement periodicals

Crime fiction is one of the most popular literary genres and has been for more than a century. At the heart of almost all forms of mysteries-from the Golden Age puzzler to the contemporary police procedural, from American hardboiled fiction to the Japanese timetable mystery-is the investigator. He-or, increasingly, she-can be a private eye, a police officer, or a general busybody. But whatever forms these investigators take, they are the key element of crime fiction. Criminals and their crimes come and go, while our attention is captured by these fascinating characters who exist at the intersection of so many different literary and social roles. 100 Greatest Literary Detectives offers a selection of the most influential, important, and intriguing fictional sleuths-amateur or professional-from around the world. From Sherlock Holmes to Harry Hole, Kinsey Millhone to Kiyoshi Mitarai, the detectives profiled here give readers a broader picture of one of fiction's most popular genres. Each entry summarizes the distinctive features of notable investigators and their approaches to crime, provides a brief outline of major features of their fictional careers, and makes a case for their importance based on literary-historical impact, novelty, uniqueness, aesthetic quality, or cultural resonance. The characters profiled here include Lew Archer, Martin Beck, Father Brown, Brother Cadfael, Adam Dalgliesh, Mike Hammer, Miss Jane Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, Kay Scarpetta, Sam Spade, Phillip Trent, V. I. Warshawski, Lord Peter Wimsey, Nero Wolfe, and many others. Readers will find some of their favorite detectives here, learn more about their literary and cultural significance, and discover other great sleuths-old and new, local and international-in this engaging volume. 100 Greatest Literary Detectives provides a fascinating look into some of the most intriguing fictional characters of all time.

With new entries and sensitive edits, this fifth edition places J.A. Cuddon s indispensable dictionary firmly in the 21st Century. * Written in a clear and highly readable style * Comprehensive historical coverage extending from ancient times to the present day * Broad intellectual and cultural range * Expands on the previous edition to incorporate the most recent literary terminology * New material is particularly focused in areas such as gender studies and queer theory, post-colonial theory, post-structuralism, post-modernism, narrative theory, and cultural studies. * Existing entries have been edited to ensure that topics receive balanced treatment

A gorgeous collection of fantastic and dreamlike tales by one of the world's most innovative contemporary writers.
"Where Europe Begins" presents a collection of startling new stories by Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. Moving through landscapes of fairy tales, family history, strange words and letters, dreams, and every-day reality, Tawada's work blurs divisions between fact and fiction, prose and poetry. Often set in physical spaces as disparate as Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany, these tales describe a fragmented world where even a city or the human body can become a sort of text. Suddenly, the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author and the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a woman traveling on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Tawada playfully makes the experience of estrangement--of a being in-between--both sensual and bewildering, and as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things while telling a fine story.

A sequel to Tomita's A Bibliographical Catalogue of Italian Books Printed in England 1558-1603, this volume provides the data for the succeeding 40 years (during the reign of King James I and Charles I) and contributes to the study of Anglo-Italian relations in literature through entries on 187 Italian books (335 editions) printed in England. The Catalogue starts with the books published immediately after the death of Queen Elizabeth I on 24 March 1603, and ends in 1642 with the closing of English theatres. It also contains 45 Elizabethan books (75 editions), which did not feature in the previous volume. Formatted along the lines of Mary Augusta Scott's Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (1916), and adopting Philip Gaskell's scientific method of bibliographical description, this volume provides reliable and comprehensive information about books and their publication, viewed in a general perspective of Anglo-Italian transactions in Jacobean and part of Caroline England.

"Conversations with William H. Gass" captures the imagination and philosophical acumen of one of America's most important aestheticians, critical theorists, fiction writers, and essayists.

From his first major novel, "Omensetter's Luck" (1966), to his numerous collections of essays and philosophical inquiries, to his controversial novel "The Tunnel" (1995), Gass (b. 1924) has proved himself a meticulous craftsman. Throughout these interviews, he reveals an aesthetic that combines ideas from sources as disparate as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, and Plato.

The interviews make clear the unity behind Gass's views is by his own design. Conversations retrace his undergraduate years at Kenyon College and his subsequent philosophical investigation of metaphor at Cornell University.

Gass has never strayed from his belief that metaphor is central and fundamental to thought and to aesthetics. In these interviews he reiterates time and again his belief that the ultimate understanding of the relationship of language to the world pivots on one's understanding of metaphor.

n interviews, in profiles, and in his own essays, Gass does not hide from questions about his art and personal motivations, no matter how frequently they are asked, nor does he toy with his interviewers. Revealing how he never shies from an intellectual joust, this collection includes a rousing, contentious debate with John Gardner, fellow literary pundit and fiction writer.

The distinction of Gass's prose is matched by the clarity and brilliance of the mind behind it. These talks allow an unobstructed view. Anyone interested in Gass's writing will delight in hearing the brutally honest voice of the mind that produced it.

The detective novel is both a product of the twentieth century and a response to the needs of readers forced to deal with social and political insecurities of the time. Thus codes of modernity are the essence of the genre, and its plausibility relies upon the degree of the readers' expectations, demands, and vicarious experiences. Even one of mystery fiction's hallmarks, the seemingly improbable but consequential encounter with strangers, is assimilated in the modern sensibility, which has been shaped by concepts of trust and confidence, of rationalism and emotion, of expertise and amateurism, and of ideology and morality. This intelligent and probing analysis of the detective novel shows how the fictional world portrayed by the mystery writer is perceived as parallel with the actual world. This apparent unity of the fictional thriller and veritable circumstance would make it possible for some high-ranking diplomat to outwit his adversaries by emulating the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Similarly, a professor of medicine might assign students the study of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories as exercises in detection or in drawing inferences, for like the work of Holmes the practice of medicine connects visible symptoms to their invisible causes. In the light of this concept of modernity Mystery Fiction and Modern Life examines works by Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Tony Hillerman, Agatha Christie, Helen MacInnes, Patricia Cornwell, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Anthony Price, and others.

Conversations with William Maxwell collects thirty-eight interviews, public speeches, and remarks that span five decades of the esteemed novelist and New Yorker editor's career. The interviews collectively address the entirety of Maxwell's literary work--with in-depth discussion of his short stories, essays, and novels including They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and the American Book award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow--as well as his forty-year tenure as a fiction editor working with such luminaries as John Updike, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, and J.D. Salinger. Maxwell's words spoken before a crowd, some previously unpublished, pay moving tribute to literary friends and mentors, and offer reflections on the artistic life, the process of writing, and his Midwestern heritage. All retain the reserved poignancy of his fiction. The volume publishes for the first time the full transcript of Maxwell's extensive interviews with his biographer and, in an introduction, correspondence with writers including Updike and Saul Bellow, which enlivens the stories behind his interviews and appearances.

The feminist poetry movement emerged as the women's movement did. It flourished in writing workshops and at open readings, on the kitchen tables, of self-publishing poets/activists, at political rallies, and in the work of established women poets who began slowly to transform their ideas about formal strategies and thematic possibilities.By 1972 feminist poetry had a solid network of feminist publishing to sustain it, and its practitioners, including Judy Grahn and Adrienne Rich, were publishing poems that contemplated not just the common oppressions faced by women themselves.This book explores the roots of this movement in the upheavals in American poetry in the 1960s and charts the central components of feminist poetry as they grew out of this period and as they were influenced by important, even revolutionary, women poets--like Emily Dickinson and Muriel Rukeyser--who had gone before. By looking not only at the volumes of poetry that emerged in the 1970s, but also at the abundant women's journals and newspapers that relied on poetry as a mainstay of expression during the period, this book demonstrates the central role that feminist poetry played in forwarding the goals and spirit of the women's movement. It also explores how this movement's early ideas and practices sustained it through periods of social and governmental backlash.Readings of six representative poets--Judy Grahn, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldua, Irena Klepfisz, Joy Harjo, and Minnie Bruce Pratt--are also offered here.These provide a close look at the ways feminist poets not only have successfully proven that a woman can be a poet but also have contributed important practices from their respective cultural traditions and affirmed the necessity to recognize differences between women themselves.The result is a full portrait of both the roots of feminist poetry in diverse American literary and cultural traditions and the substantial influence feminist poetry wields in the increasingly diverse contemporary poetry scene.

As a novelist who has spent years crafting and refining his intense and oft outrageous ""Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction"" persona, James Ellroy has used interviews as a means of shaping narratives outside of his novels. Conversations with James Ellroy covers a series of interviews given by Ellroy from 1984 to 2010, in which Ellroy discusses his literary contribution and his public and private image.Born Lee Earle Ellroy in 1948, James Ellroy is one of the most critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers of crime and historical fiction. Ellroy's complex narratives, which merge history and fiction, have pushed the boundaries of the crime fiction genre: American Tabloid, a revisionist look at the Kennedy era, was Time magazine's Novel of the Year 1995, and his novels L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia were adapted into films. Much of Ellroy's remarkable life story has served as the template for the personal obsessions that dominate his writing. From the brutal, unsolved murder of his mother, to his descent into alcohol and drug abuse, his sexual voyeurism, and his stints at the Los Angeles County Jail, Ellroy has lived through a series of hellish experiences that few other writers could claim.In Conversations with James Ellroy, Ellroy talks extensively about his life, his literary influences, his persona, and his attitudes towards politics and religion. In interviews with fellow crime writers Craig McDonald, David Peace, and others, including several previously unpublished interviews, Ellroy is at turns charismatic and eloquent, combative and enigmatic.

A collection of original essays establishing how wide the intellectual boundaries of narrative theory have become, the Edinburgh Companion to Narrative Theories showcases the latest approaches to diverse narratives across many media and in numerous disciplines. The book brings founders of the field of post-classical narrative theory together with established scholars who have made significant changes in the understanding of narrative and younger scholars who are putting narrative theories to use on new media forms and new literatures. This is the first anthology to consider what narrative is and what it can do in the wake of various turns in literary studies (the affective, the posthuman, the cognitive) which have been emerging in the context of digital media and algorithmic capital. Narrative genres persist, and they continue to do vital work in the world. Narrative theories provide the vocabulary for talking about how that work gets done.

This newly commissioned volume presents a focused overview of Dante's masterpiece, the Commedia, offering readers of today wide-ranging insights into the poem and its core features. Leading scholars discuss matters of structure, narrative, language and style, characterization, doctrine, and politics, in chapters that make their own contributions to Dante criticism by raising problems and questions that call for renewed attention, while investigating contextual concerns as well as the current state of criticism about the poem. The Commedia is also placed in a variety of cultural and historical contexts through accounts of the poem's transmission and reception that explore both its contemporary influence and its continuing legacy today. With its accessible approach, its unstinting focus on the poem and its attention to matters that have not always received adequate critical assessment, this volume will be of value to all students and scholars of Dante's great poem.