Agter hierdie boek le die verwondering oor ons vermoe om stip na letters op papier te kyk en dan te ervaar dat ons 'n ander wereld betree. Hoe kry ons dit reg om na aanleiding van die woorde wat ons lees, nie alleen inligting te bekom nie, maar 'n hele wereld tot stand te verbeel en daarheen te reis? Wat is die rol van die teks hierin? Wat is die rol van die leser? Waarom doen ons dit? Hoe help 'n begrip van ons reise na storiewerelde om ons "leefwereld" beter te verstaan? 'n Fokus op die werelde van stories maak dit moontlik om tekste krities binne hulle kontekste te lees, sonder om die spesifiekheid van elke teks te verwaarloos of om die betowering van storiewerelde te verloor. Willie Burger is professor in Afrikaanse letterkunde aan die Universiteit van Pretoria. Hy is die outeur van talle navorsingsartikels in verskeie akademiese tydskrifte en was ook as redakteur by publikasies oor vooraanstaande Afrikaanse skrywers betrokke: Sluiswagter by die dam van stemme (2002 - saam met Helize van Vuuren) oor Karel Schoeman; Die oop gesprek (2006) oor N.P. van Wyk Louw; en Contrary: Critical responses to the novels of Andre Brink (2013 - saam met Karina Szczurek). Willie het die Caxton Excellence Award in 2015 vir sy resensies in Vrouekeur ontvang, en in 2016 die kykNet-Rapport-toekenning as "Boekresensent van die jaar". Met sy resensies en rubrieke oor die letterkunde in verskeie populere publikasies probeer hy om literere navorsing ook buite die grense van die akademie te versprei.

Presents eight essays on translations and reinterpretations of Old Norse myth and saga from the eighteenth century.

What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theatre, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now revised and expanded in its third edition, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes one new chapter. The glossary and bibliography have been expanded, and new sections explore unnatural narrative, retrograde narrative, reader-resistant narratives, intermedial narrative, narrativity, and multiple interpretation. With its lucid exposition of concepts, and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland. Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney's work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney's evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney's cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers. Combining a vivid account of Heaney's life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.

Ireland's Abbey Theatre opened in 1904. Under the guidance of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, it became instrumental to the success of many of the leading Irish playwrights and actors of the early twentieth century. Conventional wisdom holds that the playwright Sean O'Casey was the first to offer a new vision of Irish authenticity in the people and struggles of inner-city Dublin in his groundbreaking trilogy The Shadow of a Gunman, The Ploughand the Stars, and Juno and the Paycock. Challenging this view, Mannion argues that there was an established tradition of urban plays within the Abbeyrepertoire that has long been overlooked by critics. She seeks to restore attention to a lesser-known corpus of Irish urban plays, specifically those that appeared at the Abbey Theatre from the theatre's founding until 1951, when the original theatre was destroyed by fire. Mannion illustrates distinct patterns within this Abbey urban genre and considers in particular themes of poverty, gender, and class. She provides historical context for the plays and considers the figures who helped shape the Abbey and this urban subset of plays. With detailed analysis of box office records and extensive appendixes of cast members and production schedules, this book offers a rich source of archival material as well as a fascinating revision to the story of this celebrated institution.

In 1850, the legendary Koh-i-noor diamond, gem of Eastern potentates, was transferred from the Punjab in India and, in an elaborate ceremony, placed into Queen Victoria's outstretched hands. This act inaugurated what author Adrienne Munich recognizes in her engaging new book as the empire of diamonds. Diamonds were a symbol of political power-only for the very rich and influential. But, in a development that also reflected the British Empire's prosperity, the idea of owning a diamond came to be marketed to the middle class. In all kinds of writings, diamonds began to take on an affordable romance. Considering many of the era's most iconic voices-from Dickens and Tennyson to Kipling and Stevenson-as well as grand entertainments such as The Moonstone, King Solomon's Mines, and the tales of Sherlock Holmes, Munich explores diamonds as fetishes that seem to contain a living spirit exerting powerful effects, and shows how they scintillated the literary and cultural imagination. Based on close textual attention and rare archival material, and drawing on ideas from material culture, fashion theory, economic criticism, and fetishism, Empire of Diamonds interprets the various meanings of diamonds, revealing a trajectory including Indian celebrity-named diamonds reserved for Asian princes, such as the Great Mogul and the Hope Diamond, their adoption by British royal and aristocratic families, and their discovery in South Africa, the mining of which devastated the area even as it opened the gem up to the middle classes. The story Munich tells eventually finds its way to America, as power and influence crosses the Atlantic, bringing diamonds to a wide consumer culture.

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is a worldwide classic of modern literature for both children and adults. Challenging in its intellectual scope, ambitious scale and range of literary reference, it is also hugely controversial due to its critique of organised religion. This collection of original essays by an international team of distinguished scholars assesses Pullman's achievement and introduces readers to some of the key debates surrounding His Dark Materials. Covering topics such as religion, gender, childhood and scientific enquiry, the volume also discusses the Hollywood film of the first book and features a new interview with Pullman himself.

Unlike most other ancient European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean civilizations, Jewish culture surprisingly developed no early epic tradition: while the Bible comprises a broad range of literary genres, epic is not among them. Not until the late medieval period, beginning in the fourteenth century, did an extensive and thriving epic tradition emerge in Yiddish. Among the few dozen extant early epics, there are several masterpieces, of which ten are translated into English in this volume. Divided between the religious and the secular, the book includes eight epics presented in their entirety, an illustrative excerpt from another epic, and a brief heroic prose tale. These texts have been chosen as the best and the most interesting representatives of the genre in terms of cultural history and literary quality: the pious ""epicizing"" of biblical narrative, the swashbuckling medieval courtly epic, Arthurian romance, heroic vignettes, intellectual high art, and popular camp.

Can a reality lived in Arabic be expressed in French? Can a French-language literary work speak Arabic? In Native Tongue, Stranger Talk Hartman shows how Lebanese women authors use spoken Arabic to disrupt literary French, with sometimes surprising results. Challenging the common claim that these writers express a Francophile or ""colonized"" consciousness, this book demonstrates how Lebanese women writers actively question the political and cultural meaning of writing in French in Lebanon. Hartman argues that their innovative language inscribes messages about society into their novels by disrupting class-status hierarchies, narrow ethno-religious identities, and rigid gender roles. Because the languages of these texts reflect the crucial issues of their times, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk guides the reader through three key periods of Lebanese history: the French Mandate and Early Independence, the Civil War, and the postwar period. Three novels are discussed in each time period, exposing the contours of how the authors ""write Arabic in French"" to invent new literary languages.

Ash spewed into the sky. All eyes were on Vesuvius. Pliny the Elder sailed towards the phenomenon. A teenage Pliny the Younger waited. His uncle did not come back. In a dazzling new literary biography, Daisy Dunn introduces Pliny the Younger, the survivor who became a Roman lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, curator of drains, and representative of the Emperor. He was confidant and friend to the great and good, an unparalleled chronicler of the Vesuvius catastrophe, and eyewitness to the terror of Emperor Domitian. The younger Pliny was adopted by his uncle, admiral of the fleet and author of the Natural History, an extraordinary compendium of knowledge and the world's first full-length encyclopaedia. The younger Pliny inherited his uncle's notebooks and carried their pearls of wisdom with him down the years. Daisy Dunn breathes vivid life back into the Plinys. Reading from the Natural History and the Younger Pliny's Letters, she resurrects the relationship between the two men to expose their beliefs on life, death and the natural world in the first century. Interweaving their work, and positioning the Plinys in relation to the devastating eruption, Dunn's biography is a celebration of two outstanding minds of the Roman Empire, and their lasting influence on the world thereafter. .

How four American cities shaped Poe's life and writings Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) changed residences about once a year throughout his life. Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American magazines, living in the cities that produced them. Scott Peeples chronicles Poe's rootless life in the cities, neighborhoods, and rooms where he lived and worked, exploring how each new place left its enduring mark on the writer and his craft. Poe wrote short stories, poems, journalism, and editorials with urban readers in mind. He witnessed urban slavery up close, living and working within a few blocks of slave jails and auction houses in Richmond and among enslaved workers in Baltimore. In Philadelphia, he saw an expanding city struggling to contain its own violent propensities. At a time when suburbs were just beginning to offer an alternative to crowded city dwellings, he tried living cheaply on the then-rural Upper West Side of Manhattan, and later in what is now the Bronx. Poe's urban mysteries and claustrophobic tales of troubled minds and abused bodies reflect his experiences living among the soldiers, slaves, and immigrants of the American city. Featuring evocative photographs by Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd challenges the popular conception of Poe as an isolated artist living in a world of his own imagination, detached from his physical surroundings. The Poe who emerges here is a man whose outlook and career were shaped by the cities where he lived, longing for a stable home.

In the wake of apartheid, South African culture conveys the sense of being lost in time and space. The Truth Commission provided an opportunity for South Africans to find their bearings in a nation changing at a bewildering pace. The Truth Commission also marked the beginning of a long process of remapping space, place and memory. In this title, Shane Graham investigates how post-apartheid theatre-makers and writers of fiction, poetry and memoir have taken this project forward, using their art to come to terms with South Africa's violent past and rapidly changing present.

In volume 1 of "Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves" (Georgia, 1997), Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler presented authoritative versions of three medieval texts invoked by Jankyn (fifth husband of the Wife of Bath) in "The Canterbury Tales." In "Jankyn's Book," volume 2, Lawler and Hanna revisit one of those texts by way of presenting all the known contemporary commentaries on it.
The text is Walter Map's "Dissuasio Valerii," that is, "The Letter of Valerius to His Friend Ruffinus, Dissuading Him from Marrying." Included in Jankyn's Book, volume 2, are seven commentaries on "Dissuasio Valerii," edited from all known manuscripts and presented in their Latin text with English translation on the facing page. Each commentary opens with a headnote. Variants are reported at the bottom of the translation pages, and full explanatory notes appear after the texts, along with a bibliography and index of sources.
In their introduction, Lawler and Hanna discuss what is known about the authors of the commentaries. Four are unknown, although one of these is almost certainly a Dominican. Of the three known authors, two are Dominicans (Eneas of Siena and the brilliant Englishman Nicholas Trivet), and one is Franciscan (John Ridewall). In addition, the editors discuss the likely readerships of the commentaries--the four humanist texts, which explicate Map's witty and allusive Latin and which were for use in school, and the three moralizing texts, which mount eloquent defenses of women and which were for use mainly by the clergy.
While Lawler and Hanna's immediate aim is to give readers of Chaucer the fullest possible background for understanding his satire on antifeminism in "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," the "Dissuasio Valerii" commentaries extend significantly our understanding of medieval attitudes, in general, toward women and marriage.

Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama shows how the leading Irish playwright explores a series of dynamic physical and intellectual environments, charting the impact of modernity on rural culture and on the imagined communities he strives to create between readers, and script, actors and audience.

The Banshees traces the feminist contributions of a wide range of Irish American women writers, from Mother Jones, Kate Chopin, and Margaret Mitchell to contemporary authors such as Gillian Flynn, Jennifer Egan, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing-including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements-has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others-both human and nonhuman-in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.

In "Borderlands Saints," Desiree A. Martin examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, Cesar Chavez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, she traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs.
Popular spirituality of this kind engages the use and exchange of relics, faith healing, pilgrimages, and spirit possession, exemplifying the contradictions between high and popular culture, human and divine, and secular and sacred. Martin focuses upon a wide range of Mexican and Chicano/a cultural works drawn from the nineteenth century to the present, covering such diverse genres as the novel, the communique, drama, the essay or cronica, film, and contemporary digital media. She argues that spiritual practice is often represented as narrative, while narrative--whether literary, historical, visual, or oral--may modify or even function as devotional practice.

The Scottish poet, author, and Christian minister George MacDonald is widely known as an inspiration for the works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Lewis Carroll, among others. Nineteenth century photographs of MacDonald present a forbidding visage, embodying Victorian-era solemnity. Yet behind the facade, as Daniel Gabelman writes, lived a whimsical and fantastical muse. Indeed, MacDonald imbued theological weight through childlike lightheartedness. Gabelman ably reveals in MacDonald's writings a bridge between playfulness and seriousness in the modern imagination. George MacDonald delivers a balanced reading of its subject that ultimately lends a new theological and literary weight to whimsy.

"The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XIII: A Vision" is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein and formerly the late Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. One of the strangest works of literary modernism, "A Vision" is Yeats's greatest occult work.
Edited by Yeats scholars Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, the volume presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history, and the life of the soul that Yeats and his wife George (nee Hyde Lees) received and created by means of mediumistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920s. Yeats obsessively revised the book, and the revised 1937 version is much more widely available than its predecessor. The original 1925 version of "A Vision," poetic, unpolished, masked in fiction, and close to the excitement of the automatic writing that the Yeatses believed to be its supernatural origin, is presented here in a scholarly edition for the first time.
The text, minimally corrected to retain the sense of the original, is extensively annotated, with particular attention paid to the relationship between the published book and its complex genetic materials. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet's late work and entrancing on its own merit, "A Vision" aims to be, all at once, a work of theoretical history, an esoteric philosophy, an aesthetic symbology, a psychological schema, and a sacred book. It is as difficult as it is essential reading for any student of Yeats.

In die afgelope bykans 30 jaar het 'n groot leemte ontstaan aan omvattende verwysingsbronne en handboeke in die Afrikaanse taalkunde wat op universiteitsvlak voorgeskryf kan word. In 2014 word hierdie leemte gevul deur Kontemporere Afrikaanse Taalkunde. Die feit dat 'n tweede, hersiene uitgawe slegs drie jaar later verskyn, beklemtoon weereens die groot behoefte aan so 'n bron. Die samestelling van hierdie boek bied 'n nuwe blik op die taalkunde en het wye gebruikspotensiaal omdat dit die kernvelde van die taalkunde, en in die besonder van die Afrikaanse taalkunde, dek. Sodoende gee dit nuwe lewe aan 'n belangrike komponent in die bestudering van die Afrikaanse taal: die taalkunde en alles wat daarmee saamhang. Inhoud en konsepte strek van die ontstaan en aard van die Afrikaanse taal, leksikografie en dokumentontwerp tot fonetiek, fonologie, morfologie, sintaksis, semantiek, pragmatiek, taalverwerwing en die normatiewe taalkunde. Al die bestaande hoofstukke is op datum gebring, en 'n ekstra hoofstuk oor sintaksis is bygevoeg om nuwer sieninge te weerspieel. Bydraes deur spesialiste in die onderskeie velde bied daarom die nuutste navorsing en 'n verskeidenheid teoretiese vertrekpunte met die Afrikaanse taalkunde as fokus. Nuwe en moontlik selfs omstrede standpunte sal akademiese gesprek stimuleer, terwyl elke hoofstuk nasionale en internasionale ontwikkelinge op die bepaalde gebied voorle aan 'n nuwe geslag studente, onderwysers, akademici en taalpraktisyns.

Richard III is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays on the stage and has been adapted successfully for film. This new and innovative edition recognizes the play's pre-eminence as a performance work: a perspective that informs every aspect of the editing. Challenging traditional practice, the text is based on the 1597 Quarto which, it is argued, brings us closest to the play as it would have been staged in Shakespeare's theatre. The introduction, which is illustrated, explores the long performance history from Shakespeare's time to the present. Its critical engagement with the play responds to recent historicist and gender-based approaches. The commentary gives detailed explication of matters of language, staging, text, and historical and cultural contexts, providing coverage that is both carefully balanced and alert to nuance of meaning. Documentation of the extensive textual variants is organized for maximum clarity: the readings of the Folio and the Quarto are presented in separate banks, and more specialist information is given at the back of the book. Appendices also include selected passages from the main source and a special index of actors and other theatrical personnel. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'The most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade...' - Financial Times 'To be savoured for its vivid and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times of the gifted Mary Shelley' - Times Literary Supplement 'Brilliant and enthralling' - Independent On Sunday 'Wonderfully vivid' - Spectator The definitive and richly woven biography of Mary Shelley, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein The creator of the world's most famous outsider became one herself . . . There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From that emerged Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations for two hundred years. Miranda Seymour illustrates the rich and unexplored life of Mary Shelley. Everything from her childhood to her tempestuous relationship with Percy Shelley; Seymour brings to life the brilliant mind that created Frankenstein through unexplored and intriguing sources. The Mary Shelley we meet here is a woman we can engage with and understand. Her world, so rich in its settings and its cast of characters, seems drawn from a novel. She, at its centre, is flawed, brave, generous, and impetuous, a woman whose dark and brilliant imagination gave us a myth which seems ever more potent in our own era.

From the end of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first, Arabic novels and Egyptian fiction have experienced a rebirth as the literary landscape has become more diverse and inclusive. Writing has moved beyond the established themes in the national canon to engage with neocolonial discourses in the globalised world. In Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel, Elsadda revisits the modern Arab literary tradition from a gender lens, questioning the process of inclusion and exclusion. In doing so, she recovers literary voices that have been marginalised because they did not fit into the ideological blueprint of the cultural elite. Exploring the literary narratives of prominent authors such as Naguib Mahfouz, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Mohammed Hussein Haikal, Elsadda interrogates the representations of femininity and masculinity in modern Arabic fiction. With a New Woman figure in Arabic literature, she distinguishes between those who support or critique modernist nation building; she also looks at the construction of the New Man and the texts that feature men who represent desirable and undesirable characteristics for the modern nation. By creating a dialogue with a broad range of novels, literary criticism, and social commentaries of men and women, Elsadda's analysis of literary masculinities goes beyond the limitations of Arabic novels and can be applied to all third world literary works that have been described as national allegories.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Clanless, lawless, homeless is he who is in love with civil war, that brutal ferocious thing.' The epic poem The Iliad begins nine years after the beginning of the Trojan War and describes the great warrior Achilles and the battles and events that take place as he quarrels with the King Agamemnon. Attributed to Homer, The Iliad, along with The Odyssey, is still revered today as the oldest and finest example of Western Literature.

The small town has become a national icon that circulates widely in literature, culture, and politics as an authentic American space and community. Yet there are surprisingly few critical studies that analyze the small town's centrality to the United States' identity and imagination. In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll addresses this need, arguing that the small town, as evoked by the image of "Main Street," is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which America's "everyday" stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global scale. Bringing together a broad selection of texts-from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, and Peter Weir's The Truman Show to the speeches of William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama-Poll examines how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. He contends that the dominant small town, despite its innocent, nostalgic appearance, is central to the development of the U.S. empire and global capitalism.