Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries. Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel's account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces. Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.

This "Encyclopedia" is the most comprehensive guide yet to both the nature and content of literature and to literary criticism. In ninety essays by leading international critics and scholars such as Catherine Belsey, Terrence Hawker, Catherine Hayles, Cora Kaplan, Christopher Norris and Don E. Wayne, the volume covers traditional topics such as literature and history, poetry, drama and the novel, and newer topics, including the production and reception of literature. Current critical ideas are clearly and provocatively discussed, while the volume's arrangement reflects in a dynamic way the rich diversity of contemporary thinking about literature.
The "Encyclopedia" includes important sections on criticism, the contexts of English literature and "other literatures" in English. Individual essays cover subjects as diverse as feminist theatre, postmodernism, medieval literature, romantic poetry, Marxist criticism, censorship, realism and the novel, contemporary American poetry, New Historicism, the origins of the modern stage, the renaissance, women and the poetic tradition, the printed book, and Shakespeare and eighteenth-century fiction. Each essay seeks to provide the reader with a clear sense of the full significance of its subject as well as guidance for further reading.
An essential work of reference, the "Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism" is a stimulating guide to the central preoccupations of contemporary critical thinking about literature.

Given the extensive influence of the 'transport revolution' on the past two centuries (a time when trains, trams, omnibuses, bicycles, cars, airplanes, and so forth were invented), and given science fiction's overall obsession with machines and technologies of all kinds, it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to transportation in this increasingly popular genre. Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles is the first book to examine the history of representations of road transport machines in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century American science fiction. The focus of this study is on two machines of the road that have been locked in a constant, often bitter, struggle with one another: the automobile and the bicycle. With chapters ranging from the early science fiction of the pulp magazine era in the 1920s and 1930s, to the postcyberpunk of the 1990s and more recent media of the 2000s such as web television, zines, and comics, this book argues that science fiction by and large perceives the car as anything but a marvelous invention of modernity. Rather, the genre often scorns and ridicules the automobile and instead promotes more sustainable, more benign, more restrained technologies of movement such as the bicycle.

E.D. Francis held that the ancient world was a unity in which concerns of the day were reflected in literary works and the language of pictorial and sculptural representations. His theories, which challenge contemporary views of Attic civilization and its artistic and literary productions, were presented as the prestigious Waynflete lectures at Oxford in 1983 and are published here for the first time. IMAGE AND IDEA IN FIFTH CENTURY GREECE constitutes the first book-length application of the controversial dating of fifth century Greek art pioneered by Francis and Michael Vickers. If Francis' arguments are correct, the pan-Hellenic construction of temples, erection of dedicatory statues, and the general joie de vivre to be found in the artifacts of the late archaic period can be seen as physical manifestations of Greek victory over the Persians in 480 and 479. Embodying some of the principal arguments for the importance of Persian influence on Greek art and civilization, IMAGE AND IDEA has important implications for our understanding of Attic culture.

How should we read a text that does not exist, or present a play the manuscript of which is lost and the identity of whose author cannot be established for certain?

Such is the enigma posed by "Cardenio" - a play performed in England for the first time in 1612 or 1613 and attributed forty years later to Shakespeare (and Fletcher). Its plot is that of a 'novella' inserted into Don Quixote, a work that circulated throughout the major countries of Europe, where it was translated and adapted for the theatre. In England, Cervantes' novel was known and cited even before it was translated in 1612 and had inspired "Cardenio."

But there is more at stake in this enigma. This was a time when, thanks mainly to the invention of the printing press, there was a proliferation of discourses. There was often a reaction when it was feared that this proliferation would become excessive, and many writings were weeded out. Not all were destined to survive, in particular plays for the theatre, which, in many cases, were never published. This genre, situated at the bottom of the literary hierarchy, was well suited to the existence of ephemeral works. However, if an author became famous, the desire for an archive of his works prompted the invention of textual relics, the restoration of remainders ruined by the passing of time or, in order to fill in the gaps, in some cases, even the fabrication of forgeries. Such was the fate of "Cardenio" in the eighteenth century.

Retracing the history of this play therefore leads one to wonder about the status, in the past, of works today judged to be canonical. In this book the reader will rediscover the malleability of texts, transformed as they were by translations and adaptations, their migrations from one genre to another, and their changing meanings constructed by their various publics. Thanks to Roger Chartier's forensic skills, fresh light is cast upon the mystery of a play lacking a text but not an author.

Responding to the reassertion of orality in the twentieth century in the form of electronic media such as the telegraph, film, video, computers, and television, this unique volume traces the roots of classical rhetoric in the modern world. Welch begins by changing the current view of classical rhetoric by reinterpreting the existing texts into fluid language contexts -- a change that requires relinquishing the formulaic tradition, acquiring an awareness of translation issues, and constructing a classical rhetoric beginning with the Fifth Century B.C. She continues with a discussion of the adaptability of this material to new language situations, including political, cultural, and linguistic change, providing it with much of its power as well as its longevity. The book concludes that classical rhetoric can readily address any situation since it focuses not only on critical stances toward discourse that already exists, but also presents elaborate theories for the production of new discourse.

This volume brings together work by established and emerging scholars to consider the work and impact of Bhai Vir Singh. Bhai Vir Singh (1872-1957) was a major force in the shaping of modern Sikh and Punjabi culture, language, and politics in the undivided colonial Punjab, prior to the Partition of the province in 1947, and in the post-colonial state of India. The chapters in this book explore how he both reflected and shaped his time and context, and address some of the ongoing legacy of his work in the lives of contemporary Sikhs. The contributors analyze the varied genres, literary and historical, that were adopted and adapted by Bhai Vir Singh to foreground and enhance Sikh religiosity and identity. These include his novels, didactic pamphlets, journalistic writing, prefatory and exegetical work on spiritual and secular historical documents, and his poems and lyrics, among others. The book will be of particular interest to those working in Sikh studies, South Asian studies and post-colonial studies.

In this book, Margaret Atwood's dystopian novels-The Handmaid's Tale, The MaddAddam trilogy, The Heart Goes Last and The Testaments-are analyzed from the perspective provided by the combined views of the construction of the posthuman subject in its interactions with science and technology, and the Anthropocene as a cultural field of enquiry. Posthumanist critical concerns try to dismantle anthropocentric notions of the human and defend the need for a closer relationship between humanity and the environment. Supported by the exemplification of the generic characteristics of the cli-fi genre, this book discusses the effects of climate change, at the individual level, and as a collective threat that can lead to a "world without us." Moreover, Margaret Atwood is herself the constant object of extensive academic interest and Posthuman theory is widely taught, researched and explored in almost every intellectual field. My book is aimed at world-wide readers, not only those interested in Margaret Atwood's oeuvre, but also those interested in the debate between critical posthumanism and transhumanism, together with the ethical implications of living in the Anthropocene era regarding our daily lives and practices. It will be especially attractive for academics: university teachers, post-graduates, researchers, and college students in general.

This study investigates the relationship between Lothar-Gunther Buchheim (1918-2007), his bestselling 1973 novel Das Boot (The Boat), and West Germany's Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. As a war reporter during the Battle of the Atlantic, Buchheim benefitted from distinct privileges, yet he was never in a position of power. Almost thirty years later, Buchheim confronted the duality of his own past and railed against what he perceived to be a varnished public memory of the submarine campaign. Michael Rothberg's theory of the implicated beneficiary is used as a lens to view Buchheim and this duality. Das Boot has been retold by others worldwide because many people claim that the story bears an anti-war message. Wolfgang Petersen's critically acclaimed 1981 film and interpretations as a comedy sketch, a theatrical play, and a streamed television sequel have followed. This trajectory of Buchheim's personal memory reflects a process that practitioners of memory studies have described as transnational memory formation. Archival footage, interviews, and teaching materials reflect the relevance of Das Boot since its debut. Given the debates that surrounded Buchheim's endeavors, the question now raised is whether Germany's "mastering the past" serves as a model for other societies analyzing their own histories. Sitting at the intersection of History, Literature and Film Studies, this is an unprecedented case study depicting how the pre- and postwar times affected writers and others caught in the middle of the drama of the era.

The so-called 'Templar of Tyre' is the third and longest section of an important 14th-century chronicle known as the Gestes des Chiprois. Written by a Cypriot knight who served the Templar Master William of Beaujeu as an Arabic translator and a member of his immediate retinue, the 'Templar of Tyre' provides precious contemporary insights, often drawn from the author's personal experience, into events beginning in the early 1230s and ending in 1309 in the East and 1314 in the West. Notably, it covers the last days of the mainland Crusader states and the fall of Acre in 1291 (providing our only eyewitness chronicle of this disaster), as well as providing information on the period following 1291. The author also reports various events in the West, including the wars of the Hohenstaufen in Italy, the rise and fall of Simon de Montfort in England, the trial and dissolution of the Templars in France, and the interminable wars of Genoa and Venice across the Mediterranean. This is the first complete translation of the 'Templar of Tyre' into English.

The text here is based on Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford's 1967 edition, footnoted to include biographical discoveries. Reviews, letters by Melville and belated praise is collected, and a wealth of new biographical material has been added, while new research is highlighted. Parker also explores what writing Moby-Dick cost Melville and his family.

The Council of Constantinople of 869-70 was highly dramatic, with its trial and condemnation of Patriarch Photius, a towering figure in the Byzantium of his day, and the tussle of wills at the council between the papal legates, the imperial representatives and the bishops. It was church politics and personalities rather than issues of doctrine, such as icon veneration, that dominated the debates. Out of all the acts of the great early councils, the acts of this council, of which this edition is the first modern translation, are the nearest to an accurate and complete record. Its protest against secular interference in ecclesiastical elections was taken up later in the West and led to this council's being accorded full ecumenical status, although it had been repudiated in Byzantium soon after it was held. No early council expresses so vividly the tension between Rome's claim to supreme authority and the Byzantine reduction of this to a primacy of honour.

An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. What's in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Bialoszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz Rozewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. Kremer's is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experiments-from poetic "sound postcards," to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the most celebrated and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He was awarded in 1928 the Nobel prize for literature for his philosophical work, and his controversial ideas about time, memory and life shaped generations of thinkers, writers and artists. In this clear and engaging introduction, Mark Sinclair examines the full range of Bergson's work. The book sheds new light on familiar aspects of Bergson's thought, but also examines often ignored aspects of his work, such as his philosophy of art, his philosophy of technology and the relation of his philosophical doctrines to his political commitments. After an illuminating overview of his life and work, chapters are devoted to the following topics: the experience of time as duration the experience of freedom memory mind and body laughter and humour knowledge art and creativity the elan vital as a theory of biological life ethics, religion, war and modern technology With a final chapter on his legacy, Bergson is an outstanding guide to one of the great philosophers. Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary, it is essential reading for those interested in metaphysics, time, free will, aesthetics, the philosophy of biology, continental philosophy and the role of European intellectuals in World War I.

This is a timely book that, through an insightful exploration of recent art (literary and visual texts) created by members of the Latinx community, places emphasis on social bonds and forms of conviviality that run counter to contemporary anti-Latinx discourse. Drawing mostly on neo-cosmopolitan approaches, this book provides a fresh slant on the Latinx stranger, as it not only exposes the processes of othering to which Latinxs are subjected, but also foregrounds their potential to imagine convivial modes of interaction that foster solidarity and social change. The themes and the level of scholarship at stake in this volume appeal to a variety of subject areas, e.g., US Latinx literature and culture, border studies and American studies, all of which are increasingly widely taught in US campuses, and to a lesser (but still significant) extent also in European and Latin American universities. Besides, its focus on pressing contemporary issues, ranging from Latinx immigration, family separation at the US-Mexico border, Latinx urban life, and Latinx politics in the US, may also appeal to non-specialist audiences who wish to learn what it means to be a Latinx politically and culturally. Formed by a team of geographically diverse contributors, some of whom are renowned writers and scholars (e.g., Norma Cantu), while others are at the beginning of promising careers, this volume takes a critical but also optimist approach to tackling some of the challenges that Latinxs, as well as other minorities around the world, are experiencing in contexts of increasing racism and other forms of hatred.

This monograph examines the imperial spectacles and startling reversals of fortune related in History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), and investigates how Prescott's histories inspired fictional adaptations by George A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and George Griffith. The revision of history in the Amerindian adventure entertained young transatlantic audiences, was a vehicle to attract tourism and investment in countries such as Mexico and Peru, and a way to impart British values. Such values compel the characters and narrators of novels discussed to act as cultural mediators, to acquire indigenous languages and adopt native ways of being, and, in several of the romances under consideration, to marry Mexican or Incan noblewomen. Part I, Conquest, examines George Henty's By Right of Conquest: Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1891), Rider Haggard's Montezuma's Daughter (1893) and George Griffith's Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (1898). Part II, Reclamation, argues that English re-writings of history work to eclipse the Spanish in Haggard's of Virgin the Sun (1922), Henty's Treasure of the Incas (1902) and Griffith's Romance of Golden Star (1897).

This microhistory of the Salvagos-an Istanbul family of Venetian interpreters and spies travelling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean-is a remarkable feat of the historian's craft of storytelling. With his father having been killed by secret order of Venice and his nephew to be publicly assassinated by Ottoman authorities, Genesino Salvago and his brothers started writing self-narratives. When crossing the borders of words and worlds, the Salvagos' self-narratives helped navigate at times beneficial, other times unsettling entanglements of empire, family, and translation. The discovery of an autobiographical text with rich information on Southeastern Europe, edited here for the first time, is the starting point of this extraordinary microbiography of a family's intense struggle for manoeuvring a changing world disrupted by competition, betrayal, and colonialism. This volume recovers the Venetian life stories of Ottoman subjects and the crucial role of translation in negotiating a shared but fragile Mediterranean. Stefan Hanss examines an interpreter's translational practices of the self and recovers the wider Mediterranean significance of the early modern Balkan contact zone. Offering a novel conversation between translation studies, Mediterranean studies, and the history of life-writing, this volume argues that dragomans' practices of translation, border-crossing, and mobility were key to their experiences and performances of the self. This book is an indispensable reading for the history of the early modern Mediterranean, self-narratives, Venice, the Ottoman Empire, and Southeastern Europe, as well as the history of translation. Hanss presents a truly fascinating narrative; a microhistory full of insights and rich perspectives.

Provides an accessible introduction to the Environmental Humanities, a complex and interdisciplinary area, and designed to provide a foundation for future study, projects and pursuits. Written by academics with experience of teaching and writing in the field. Content is engaging and includes case studies, discussion questions, annotated bibliographies, and links to online resources. Organised by subject, this book could be used on general environmental humanities courses, or individual chapters could be used on subject specific courses i.e. Environmental History, environmental film etc.

This collection shows students of English and applied linguistics ways in which language and literary study can be integrated. By drawing on a wide range of texts by mainly British and American writers, from a variety of different periods, the contributors show how discourse stylistics can provide models for the systematic description of, for example, dialogue in fiction; language of drama and balladic poetry; speech presentation; the interactive properties of metre; the communicative context of author/reader. Among the texts examined are novels, poetry and drama by major twentieth-century writers such as Joyce, Auden, Pinter and Hopkins, as well as examples from Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Each chapter has a wide range of exercises for practical analysis, an extensive glossary and a comprehensive bibliography with suggestions for further reading. The book will be particularly useful to undergraduate students of English and applied linguistics and advanced students of modern languages or English as a foreign language.

This volume overturns traditional definitions of narrative by arguing that any story, whether a Bette Davis film, a jeans ad, a Jane Austen novel of a "Cathy" comic, must be related to larger cultural networks. The authors show how meanings and subjectivity do not exist in isolation, but are manufactured by the narratives our culture reads and watches every day. They call for a critical practice that, through the fracturing of texts, can alter the grounds of knowledge and interpretation. This study should interest critics of narrative and culture, as well as students wanting to extend post-Saussurean theories to popular and canonical cultures, and to the dynamics of story-telling itself.

William Faulkner and Mortality is the first full-length study of mortality in William Faulkner's fiction. The book challenges earlier, influential scholarly considerations of death in Faulkner's work that claimed that writing was his authorial method of 'saying No to death'. Through close-readings of six key works - The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, "A Rose for Emily", Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses - this book examines how Faulkner's characters confront various experiences of human mortality, including grief, bereavement, mourning, and violence. The trauma and ambivalence caused by these experiences ultimately compel these characters to 'say Yes to death'. The book makes a clear distinction between Faulkner's quest for literary immortality through writing and the desire for death exhibited by the principal characters in the works analysed. William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound offers a new paradigm for reading Faulkner's oeuvre, and adds an alternative voice to a debate within Faulkner scholarship long thought to have ended.

Examining the surrealist novels of several contemporary writers including Edwidge Danticat, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Junot Diaz, Helen Oyeyemi, and Colson Whitehead, AfroSurrealism, the first book-length exploration of AfroSurreal fiction, argues that we have entered a new and exciting era of the black novel, one that is more invested than ever before in the cross sections of science, technology, history, folklore, and myth. Building on traditional surrealist scholarship and black studies criticism, the author contends that as technology has become ubiquitous, the ways in which writers write has changed; writers are producing more surrealist texts to represent the psychological challenges that have arisen during an era of rapid social and technological transitions. For black writers, this has meant not only a return to Surrealism, but also a complete restructuring in the way that both past and present are conceived, as technology, rather than being a means for demeaning and brutalizing a black labor force, has become an empowering means of sharing information. Presenting analyses of contemporary AfroSurreal fiction, this volume examines the ways in which contemporary writers grapple with the psychology underlying this futuristic technology, presenting a cautiously optimistic view of the future, together with a hope for better understanding of the past. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural, media and literary studies with interests in the contemporary novel, Surrealism, and black fiction.

The belief in the reality of demons and the restless dead formed a central facet of the medieval worldview. Whether a pestilent-spreading corpse mobilised by the devil, a purgatorial spirit returning to earth to ask for suffrage, or a shape-shifting demon intent on crushing its victims as they slept, encounters with supernatural entities were often met with consternation and fear. Chroniclers, hagiographers, sermon writers, satirists, poets, and even medical practitioners utilised the cultural 'text' of the supernatural encounter in many different ways, showcasing the multiplicity of contemporary attitudes to death, disease, and the afterlife. In this volume, Stephen Gordon explores the ways in which conflicting ideas about the intention and agency of supernatural entities were understood and articulated in different social and literary contexts. Focusing primarily on material from medieval England, c.1050-1450, Gordon discusses how writers such as William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, Walter Map, John Mirk, and Geoffrey Chaucer utilised the belief in demons, nightmares, and walking corpses for pointed critical effect. Ultimately, this monograph provides new insights into the ways in which the broad ontological category of the 'revenant' was conceptualised in the medieval world.