Chaucer's best-known poem, The Canterbury Tales, is justly celebrated for its richness and variety, both literary - the Tales include fabliaux, romances, sermons, hagiographies, fantasies, satires, treatises, fables and exempla - and thematic, with its explorations of courtly love and scatology, piety and impiety, chivalry and pacifism, fidelity and adultery. Students new to Chaucer will find in this Companion a lively introduction to the poem's diversity, depth, and wonder. Readers returning to the Tales will appreciate the chapters' fresh engagement with the individual tales and their often complicated critical histories, inflected in recent decades by critical approaches attentive to issues of gender, sexuality, class, and language.

In Queer Tidalectics, Emilio Amideo investigates how Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo employ the trope of fluidity to articulate a Black queer diasporic aesthetics. Water recurs as a figurative and material site to express the Black queer experience within the diaspora, a means to explore malleability and overflowing sexual, gender, and racial boundaries. Amideo triangulates language, the aquatic, and affect to delineate a Black queer aesthetics, one that uses an idiom of fluidity, slipperiness, and opacity to undermine and circumvent gender normativity and the racialized heteropatriarchy embedded in English. The result is an outline of an ever-expanding affective archive of experiential knowledge. Amideo engages and extends the work of Black queer studies, Oceanic studies, ecocriticism, phenomenology, and new materialism through the theorizations of Sara Ahmed, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, M. Jacqui Alexander, Edouard Glissant, JosE Esteban MuNoz, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others. Ambitious in scope and captivating to read, Queer Tidalectics brings Caribbean writers like Glissant and Brathwaite into queer literary analysis-a major scholarly contribution.

The captivating stories behind fifty of the greatest authors and their most famous literary creations Before Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara ?, there had never been a single volume that explored the backstories of so many of the greatest books in the English language. A work sure to captivate all lovers of language and literature, it reveals in short, pithy chapters, the lives, loves, motivations, and quirky, fascinating details involving fifty of the best-loved books of the Western world. - When stacked up, the original manuscript of Gone With the Wind stood taller than Margaret Mitchell, its 4' 9 1/2" author - Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was part of the Allied team that cracked the Nazi's Enigma code - Leo Tolstoy's wife copied War and Peace by hand . . . seven times From The Great Gatsby to Harper Lee, from Jaws to J. K . Rowling, Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara? offers an entertaining and informative journey through the minds of writers and the life experiences that took these amazing works from notion to novel.

'A problem of space first of all, then a problem of order' One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec was a true original who delighted in wordplay, puzzles, taxonomies and seeing the extraordinary in the everyday. In these virtuoso writings about books and language, he discusses different ways of reading, a list of the things he really must do before he dies and the power of words to overcome the chaos of the world. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

Despite publishing endeavours such as the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series in the 1970s and Fantasy Masterworks in the early 2000s, the canon of modern fantasy is still very much in flux. This Element examines four key questions raised by the prospect of a fantasy canon: the way in which canon and genre influence each other; the overwhelming presence of Tolkien in any discussion of the classics of fantasy; the multi-media and transmedia nature of the field; and the push for a more inclusive and diverse canon.

Vladimir Sorokin is the most prominent and the most controversial contemporary Russian writer. Having emerged as a prose writer in Moscow's artistic underground in the late 1970s and early 80s, he became visible to a broader Russian audience only in the mid-1990s, with texts shocking the moralistic expectations of traditionally minded readers by violating not only Soviet ideological taboos, but also injecting vulgar language, sex, and violence into plots that the postmodernist Sorokin borrowed from nineteenth-century literature and Socialist Realism. Sorokin became famous when the Putin youth organization burned his books in 2002 and he picked up neo-nationalist and neo-imperialist discourses in his dystopian novels of the 2000s and 2010s, making him one of the fiercest critics of Russia's "new middle ages," while remaining steadfast in his dismantling of foreign discourses.

Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is the first book to study the biopolitics of the mass adoption movement of children and youngsters from Greece to the U.S. starting in the 1950s. The children of Greece were caught in the crossfire of a tumultuous civil war, as both sides of the conflict effected the forced removal of children to internment camps and schools of various kinds. The book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the U.S.United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global Cold War. Greek-to-American adoptions and, regrettably, their transgressions, provided the blueprint for the first large-scale international adoptions, before a mass phenomenon typically associated with Asian children. The story of these Greek postwar and Cold War adoptions, whose procedures ranged from legal to highly irregular, has never been told or analyzed before. This book aims to fill that gap, also for the uncounted adoptees and their descendants whose lives are still affected today.

French thinkers have revolutionized European thought about knowledge, religion, politics, and society. Delivering a comprehensive history of thought in France from the Middle Ages to the present, this book follows themes and developments of thought across the centuries. It provides readers with studies of both systematic thinkers and those who operate less systematically, through essays or fragments, and places them all in their many contexts. Informed by up-to-date research, these accessible chapters are written by prominent experts in their fields who investigate key concepts in non-technical language. Chapters feature treatments of specific thinkers as individuals including Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes and Derrida, but also more general movements and schools of thought from humanism to liberalism, via the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Marxism, and feminism. Furthermore, the influence of gender, race, empire and slavery are investigated to offer a broad and fulfilling account of French thought throughout the ages.

Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of the indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's ""Gravity's Rainbow"". Steven Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of ""Gravity's Rainbow"" - how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of ""Gravity's Rainbow"": Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty ""Great Books of the Twentieth Century.

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

"A work of enormous importance. Of all the poems of the English Middle Ages, Piers Plowman is the one that most deserves and needs annotation of the fullest and best possible kind, both because it is a text of unrivaled literary quality and interest, and because it is characteristically knotty and deploys a language of unusual richness, density, and allusiveness. Much of this allusiveness is to areas of learning that are not at every modern reader's fingertips. A particular difficulty is the existence of the poem in three authorial versions of almost desperate complexity. It will be an immense triumph to have a commentary which elucidates their relationships as a matter of policy and not simply as the result of conflating annotation on the different versions."-Derek Pearsall The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first two of its five projected volumes. The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement in its social world is unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful. The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements. Andrew Galloway's Volume 1 treats the poem's first vision, from the Prologue through Passus 4, in all three versions, accepting the C text as the poet's final word but excavating downward through the earlier B and A texts. Stephen Barney's volume completes the framework for the commentary, dealing with the final three passus of the poem, extant only in the B and C versions. Subsequent volumes will be the work of Ralph Hanna, Traugott Lawler, and Anne Middleton. Overall, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman marks a new stage of concentrated yet wide-ranging attention to a text whose repeated revisions and literary and intellectual complexity make it both an elusive object of inquiry and a literary work whose richness has long deserved the capacious and minutely detailed treatment that only a full commentary can allow. Perhaps no poem in English appeals more than Piers Plowman to those readers who understand Yeats's "fascination with things difficult," yet The Penn Commentary will enable generations of readers to share in the pleasures and challenges of experiencing, engaging with, and trying to elucidate the difficulties of one of the towering achievements of English literature. Andrew Galloway is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Cornell University.

Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updikes Fiction offers a selective reading of this prolific authors oeuvre, concentrating on Updikes career-spanning reoccupation with issues of faith and doubt. In Baileys reading, at the heart of Updike's work is the tension between affirming the continuance of the 'heady wine of religious consolation' and the deepening anxiety that the best that humanity can hope for is 'the bleak fare of more endurance.' Focusing on a trio of Olinger stories, the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, In the beauty of the Lilies, and Rabbit Remembered, Bailey locates the dialectical situation at the center of Updike's literary career in his conflicted sense of himself as a Christian novelist and Howellsian realist. Bailey's thematically centered study reveals a substantial stylistic component in Updike's dilemma of belief; therefore, a significant objective of this study involves illuminating the author's conflict between creating an eschatologically inspired mimesis reflective of a 'knowing eye' behind appearances of reality, or settling for a historically based realism that, in Howellsian fashion, can do nothing more spiritually meaningful than to record (and thus literally preserve) that which is an will one day be no more. Rabbit Angstrom is Updike's most significant fictional creation, Bailey contends, because his impulses toward religious skepticism are so inadequately possessed of the intellectual and literary buffers that provide Updike and some of his other protagonists with temporary forms of solace or compensation. Rabbit's deepening skepticism that 'goodness lies inside, there is nothing outside' finds it corollary in the evolution delineated in Updike's work, transforming it from the 'song of joy' in affirmation of creation the 'The Blessed Man of Boston' narrator David Kern invokes, to the chronological reconstruction of history as attempted compensation for a relinquished belief in times spiritual significance in In the Beauty of th

African American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990 tracks Black expressive culture in the 1980s as novelists, poets, dramatists, filmmakers, and performers grappled with the contradictory legacies of the civil rights era, and the start of culture wars and policy machinations that would come to characterize the 1990s. The volume is necessarily interdisciplinary and critically promiscuous in its methodologies and objects of study as it reconsiders conventional temporal, spatial, and moral understandings of how African American letters emerged immediately after the movement James Baldwin describes as the 'latest slave rebellion.' As such, the question of the state of America's democratic project as refracted through the literature of the shaping presence of African Americans is one of the guiding concerns of this volume preoccupied with a moment in American literary history still burdened by the legacies of the 1960s, while imagining the contours of an African Americanist future in the new millennium.

This book examines representations of war throughout American literary history, providing a firm grounding in established criticism and opening up new lines of inquiry. Readers will find accessible yet sophisticated essays that lay out key questions and scholarship in the field. War and American Literature provides a comprehensive synthesis of the literature and scholarship of US war writing, illuminates how themes, texts, and authors resonate across time and wars, and provides multiple contexts in which texts and a war's literature can be framed. By focusing on American war writing, from the wars with the Native Americans and the Revolutionary War to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this volume illuminates the unique role representations of war have in the US imagination.

Who hasn't peeked over the shoulder of the person reading next to them on the subway, curious about the book in their hands? Who doesn't secretly love skipping the party to stay home and read? Who hasn't daydreamed of catching the eye of a future significant other as you discover from across the room that you're reading the same book? If you're a reader, you know you've been there, and probably in so many other weird places as well, right? That's what happens with readers, they have these strange traits, these particular ways, that separate them from the rest. Reading Quirks explores, in 72 lighthearted four-frame cartoons, all these weird things readers do, from the existential dilemma of picking your next read to the frustrations of watching an overzealous dog-earer in action. The series was written and created by a bookstore in Dallas, The Wild Detectives, originally as a social media campaign-a way to connect with other readers over a shared understanding of what it means to be crazy about books. Laura Pacheco's adorable illustrations introduce a cast of endearing characters, whose flaws and obsessions range from disarming good nature to mischievous playfulness. Reading Quirks is a witty and light-hearted ode to the immense pleasure of reading and its resulting byproduct: neurosis.

Technology in Irish Literature and Culture shows how such significant technologies-typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers-have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative and consumption habits of a culture utterly reliant on the digital. This text plumbs the origins of the present moment, examining the longer history of literature's interactions with the technological and exploring how the transformative capacity of modern technology has been mediated throughout a diverse national canon. Comprising essays from some of the major figures of Irish literary and cultural studies, this volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive account of how Irish literature and culture have interacted with technology.

This volume maps Shakespearean virtue in all its plasticity and variety, providing thirty-eight succinct, wide-ranging essays that reveal a breadth and diversity exceeding any given morality or code of behaviour. Clearly explaining key concepts in the history of ethics and in classical, theological, and global virtue traditions, the collection reveals their presence in the works of Shakespeare in interpersonal, civic, and ecological scenes of action. Paying close attention to individual identity and social environment, chapters also consider how the virtuous horizons broached in Shakespearean drama have been tested anew by the plays' global travels and fresh encounters with different traditions. Including sections on global wisdom, performance and pedagogy, this handbook affirms virtue as a resource for humanistic education and the building of human capacity.

The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets offers a fascinating introduction to Irish poetry from the seventeenth century to the present. Aimed primarily at lovers of poetry, it examines a wide range of poets, including household names, such as Jonathan Swift, Thomas Moore, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon. The book is comprised of thirty chapters written by critics, leading scholars and poets, who bring an authoritative and accessible understanding to their subjects. Each chapter gives an overview of a poet's work and guides the general reader through the wider cultural, historical and comparative contexts. Exploring the dual traditions of English and Irish-speaking poets, this Companion represents the very best of Irish poetry and highlights understanding that reveals, in clear and accessible prose, the achievement of Irish poetry in a global context. It is a book that will help and guide general readers through the many achievements of Irish poets.

The Wheel of Time is now an original series on Prime Video, starring Rosamund Pike as Moiraine!

Since its debut in 1990, The Wheel of Time® by Robert Jordan has captivated millions of readers around the globe with its scope, originality, and compelling characters. The definitive encyclopedia of the series, the companion sheds light on some of the most intriguing aspects of the world, including biographies and motivations of many characters that never made it into the books, but helped bring Jordan's world to life.

Over the course of fifteen books and millions of words, the world that Jordan created grew in depth and complexity. However, only a fraction of what Jordan imagined ended up on the page, the rest going into his personal files.

Included in the volume in an A-to-Z format are:

• An entry for each named character
• An inclusive dictionary of the Old Tongue
• New maps of the Last Battle
• New portraits of many characters
• Histories and customs of the nations of the world
• The strength level of many channelers
• Descriptions of the flora and fauna unique to the world and much more!

The Wheel of Time Companion is required reading for The Wheel of Time's millions of fans.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot includes several new chapters, providing an essential introduction to all aspects of Eliot's life and writing. Accessible essays by some of the most distinguished scholars of Victorian literature provide lucid and original insights into the work of one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century, author most famously of Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Daniel Deronda. From an introduction that traces her originality as a realist novelist, the book moves on to extensive considerations of each of Eliot's novels, her life and her publishing history. Chapters address the problems of money, philosophy, religion, politics, gender and science, as they are developed in her novels. With its supplementary materials, including a chronology and an extensive section of suggested readings, this Companion is an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike.

Una coleccion de ensayos escogidos del critico John Beverley en el campo del Latinoamericanismo literario, atento a los conexiones entre literatura, hegemonia, y conflicto social. Abarca el periodo que va desde los ochenta del siglo pasado hasta hoy. Los temas incluyen el barroco colonial y su fuerza hegemonica en la cultura latinoamericana, el testimonio como genero emergente, la literatura militante, el postmodernismo, la relacion entre critica literaria y cultural y el desarrollo de la llamada Marea Rosada, y en general el impacto de los estudios postcoloniales y subalternos. La coleccion proporciona una vision critica de la ciudad letrada latinoamericana y una defensa del campo de la critica literaria como un lugar de constituir y reconstituir la hegemonia. En este sentido, se situa a la vez contra la llamada "crisis de las humanidades" inducida por los efectos ideologicos del neoliberalismo, pero tambien contra posiciones criticas, como la desconstruccion, que aspiran a una trascendencia de la critica literaria como tal, y del proyecto del Latinoamericanismo en terminos generales.

From his first fifteen years in Chile, to his nine years in Mexico City from 1968 to 1977, to the quarter of a century he lived and worked in the Blanes-Barcelona area on the Costa Brava in Spain through his death in 2003, Roberto Bolano developed into an astonishingly diverse, prolific writer. He is one of the most consequential and widely read of his generation in any language. Increasingly recognized not only in Latin America, but as a major figure in World Literature, Bolano is an essential writer for the 21st century world. This volume provides a comprehensive mapping of the pivotal contexts, events, stages, and influences shaping Bolano's writing. As the wide-ranging investigations of this volume's 30 distinguished scholars show, Bolano's influence and impact will shape literary cultures worldwide for years to come.

Does the study of aesthetics have tangible effects in the real world? Does examining the work of diaspora writers and artists change our view of ""the Other""? In this thoughtful book, Ebrahimi argues that an education in the humanities is as essential as one in politics and ethics, critically training the imagination toward greater empathy. Despite the surge in Iranian memoirs, their contributions to debunking an abstract idea of terror and their role in encouraging democratic thinking remain understudied. In examining creative work by women of Iranian descent, Ebrahimi argues that Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, and Parsua Bashi make the Other familiar and break a cycle of reactionary xenophobia. These authors, instead of relying on indignation, build imaginative bridges in their work that make it impossible to blame one evil, external enemy. Ebrahimi explores both classic and hybrid art forms, including graphic novels and photo-poetry, to advocate for the importance of aesthetics to inform and influence a global community. Drawing on the theories of Ranciere, Butler, Arendt, and Levinas, Ebrahimi identifies the ways in which these works give a human face to the Other, creating the space and language to imagine a new political and ethical landscape.

This eighteenth and final volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald is a variorum edition of The Great Gatsby (1925), the author's masterpiece. The variorum text is based on multiple witnesses including the extant holograph of the novel and Fitzgerald's revised galley proofs; the first edition and later impressions from the first-edition plates; and importantly, Fitzgerald's personal copy of the novel, which bears corrections and revisions in his hand. This edition removes instances of over-correction in later editions of the novel, where there are numerous examples of textual corruption, thus giving control of the text back to Fitzgerald. This critical edition includes an introduction, tracing the history of the novel, an emended text, emendation tables, Fitzgerald's 1935 introduction, and fourteen illustrations. Historical annotations provide identifications of persons, places, events, popular songs, and literary works - all now made available to readers, teachers, critics, and scholars.