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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
Timescapes of Waiting explores the intersections of temporality and
space by examining various manifestations of spatial (im-)mobility.
The individual articles approach these spaces from a variety of
academic perspectives - including the realms of history,
architecture, law and literary and cultural studies - in order to
probe the fluid relationships between power, time and space. The
contributors offer discussion and analysis of waiting spaces like
ante-chambers, prisons, hospitals, and refugee camps, and also of
more elusive spaces such as communities and nation-states.
Contributors: Olaf Berwald, Elise Brault-Dreux, Richard Hardack,
Kerstin Howaldt, Robin Kellermann, Amanda Lagji, Margaret Olin,
Helmut Puff, Katrin Roeder, Christoph Singer, Cornelia Wachter,
Robert Wirth.
Diane di Prima (1934-2020) was one of the most important American
poets of the twentieth century, and her career is distinguished by
strong contributions to both literature and social justice. Di
Prima and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) edited The Floating Bear
(1962-69), one of the most significant underground publications of
the sixties. Di Prima's poetry and prose chronicle her opposition
to the Vietnam War; her advocacy of the rights of Blacks, Native
Americans, and the LGBTQ community; her concern about environmental
issues; and her commitment to creating a world free of exploitation
and poverty. In addition, di Prima is significant due to her
challenges to the roles that American women were expected to play
in society. Her Memoirs of a Beatnik was a sensation, and she talks
about its lasting impact as well. Conversations with Diane di Prima
presents twenty interviews ranging from 1972 to 2010 that chart di
Prima's intellectual, spiritual, and political evolution. From her
adolescence, di Prima was fascinated by occult, esoteric, and
magical philosophies. In these interviews readers can see the ways
these concepts influenced both her personal life and her poetry and
prose. We are able to view di Prima's life course from her year at
Swarthmore College; her move back to New York and then to San
Francisco; her studies of Zen Buddhism; her fascination with the I
Ching, Paracelsus, John Dee, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, alchemy,
Tarot, and Kabbalah; and her later engagement with Tibetan Buddhism
and work with Chogyam Trungpa. Another particularly interesting
aspect of the book is the inclusion of interviews that explore di
Prima's career as an independent publisher-she founded Poets Press
in New York and Eidolon Editions in California-and her commitment
to promoting writers such as Audre Lorde. Taken together, these
interviews reveal di Prima as both a writer of genius and an
intensely honest, direct, passionate, and committed advocate of a
revolution in consciousness.
Cultural Pearls from the East offers fascinating insights into
Muslim-Arab culture and the evolution of its intellectual nature
and literary texts from early Islam to modern times. The textual
analysis of largely unexplored literary works and chronicles that
epitomize this volume highlight the affinity between culture,
society, and politics, exploring these issues from both thematic
and comparative perspectives. Among the topics examined in depth:
Arabic poetry of warfare at the dawn of Islam; medieval poems about
venerated sites and saints; Ottoman and Egyptian chronicles
portraying the socioreligious landscapes of Egypt and the Fertile
Crescent under the Ottoman Empire and in the shadow of growing
European encroachment; and Arab-Jewish literature dealing with
suppression, exile, and identity. Contributors: Ghaleb Anabseh,
Albert Arazi, Meir M. Bar-Asher, Peter Chelkowski, Geula Elimelekh,
Sigal Goorj, Jane Hathaway, Meir Hatina, Yair Huri-Horesh, Amir
Lerner, Menachem Milson, Gabriel M. Rosenbaum, Joseph Sadan, Yona
Sheffer, Norman (Noam) A. Stillman, Ibrahim Taha, Michael Winter,
Eman Younis
Is Laurence Sterne one of the great Christian apologists? Ryan
Stark recommends him as such, perhaps to the detriment of the
parson's roguish reputation. The book's aim, however, is not to
dispel roguishness but rather to discern the theological motives
behind Sterne's comic rhetoric, from Tristram Shandy and the
sermons to A Sentimental Journey. To this end, Stark reveals a
veritable avalanche of biblical themes and allusions to be found in
Sterne, often and seemingly awkwardly in the middle of sex jokes,
and yet the effect is not to produce irreverence. On the contrary,
we find an irreverently reverent apologetic, Stark argues, and a
priest who knows how to play gracefully with religious ideas.
Through Sterne, in fact, we might rethink humour's role in the
service of religion.
New Voices of Muslim North-African Migrants in Europe captures the
experience in writing of a fast growing number of individuals
belonging to migrant communities in Europe. The book follows
attempts to transform postcolonial literary studies into a
comparative, translingual, and supranational project. Cristian H.
Ricci frames Moroccan literature written in European languages
within the ampler context of borderland studies. The author
addresses the realm of a literature that has been practically
absent from the field of postcolonial literary studies (i.e.
Neerlandophone or Gay Muslim literature). The book also converses
with other minor literatures and theories from Sub-Saharan Africa,
as well as Asians and Latino/as in the Americas that combine
histories of colonization, labor migration, and enforced exile.
Winner of the British Association for Comtemporary Literary Stuides
(BACLS) monograph prize The period since the Good Friday Agreement
in 1998 has seen a sustained decrease in violence and, at the same
time, Northern Ireland has undergone a literary renaissance, with a
fresh generation of writers exploring innovative literary forms.
This book explores contemporary Northern Irish fiction and how the
'post'-conflict period has led writers to a renewed engagement with
intimacy and intimate life. Magennis draws on affect and feminist
theory to examine depictions of intimacy, pleasure and the body in
their writings and shows how intimate life in Northern Ireland is
being reshaped and re-written. Featuring short reflective pieces
from some of today's most compelling Northern Irish Writers,
including Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, Bernie McGill and David Park,
this book provides authoritative insights into how a contemporary
engagement with intimacy provides us with new ways to understand
Northern Irish identity, selfhood and community.
In this comprehensive study, Kenneth Morgan provides an
authoritative account of European exploration and discovery in
Australia. The book presents a detailed chronological overview of
European interests in the Australian continent, from initial
speculations about the 'Great Southern Land' to the major
hydrographic expeditions of the 19th century. In particular, he
analyses the early crossings of the Dutch in the 17th century, the
exploits of English 'buccaneer adventurer' William Dampier, the
famous voyages of James Cook and Matthew Flinders, and the
little-known French annexation of Australia in 1772. Introducing
new findings and drawing on the latest in historiographical
research, this book situates developments in navigation, nautical
astronomy and cartography within the broader contexts of imperial,
colonial, and maritime history.
When British and American leaders today talk of the nation-whether
it is Theresa May, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump-they do so, in
part, in terms established by eighteenth-century British
literature. The city on a hill and the sovereign individual are
tropes at the center of modern Anglo-American political thought,
and the literature that accompanied Britain's rise to imperial
prominence played a key role in creating them. We Are Kings is the
first book to interpret eighteenth-century British literature from
the perspective of political theology. Spencer Jackson returns here
to a body of literature long associated with modernity's origins
without assuming that modernity entails a separation of the
religious from the profane. The result is a study that casts this
literature in a surprisingly new light. From the patriot to the
marriage plot, the narratives and characters of eighteenth-century
British literature are the products of the politicization of
religion, Jackson argues; the real story of this literature is
neither secularization nor the survival of orthodox
Judeo-Christianity but rather the expansion of a movement beginning
in the High Middle Ages to transfer the transcendent authority of
the Catholic Church to the English political sphere. The novel and
the modern individual, then, are in a sense both secular and
religious at once-products of a modern political faith that has
authorized Anglo-American exceptionalism from the eighteenth
century to the present.
In the context of a diversified and pluralistic arena of
contemporary literature embodying previously marginalized voices of
region, ethnicity, gender, and class, black poets living in Britain
developed a distinct branch of contemporary poetry. Having emerged
from a struggle to give voice to marginalized groups in Britain,
the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, and Fred
D'Aguiar helped define national identity and explored racial
oppression. Motivated by a sense of responsibility towards their
communities, these poets undertook the task of transmitting black
history to young blacks who risked losing ties to their roots. They
also emphasized the necessity of fighting racism by constructing an
awareness of Afro-Caribbean national identity while establishing
black cultural heritage in contemporary British poetry. In this
book, Turkish literary scholar Dilek Bulut Sar?kaya examines their
works. Linton Kwesi Johnson's Voices of the Living and the Dead
(1974), Inglan is a Bitch (1980), and Tings an Times (1991) open
the study, followed by David Dabydeen's Slave Song (1984), Coolie
Odyssey (1988), and Turner (1994) and, finally, Fred D'Aguiar's
Mama Dot (1985), Airy Hall (1989) and British Subjects (1993).
This volume is the first attempt to reconsider the entire corpus of
an ancient canonical author through the lens of queerness broadly
conceived, taking as its subject Euripides, the latest of the three
great Athenian tragedians. Although Euripides' plays have long been
seen as a valuable source for understanding the construction of
gender and sexuality in ancient Greece, scholars of Greek tragedy
have only recently begun to engage with queer theory and its
ongoing developments. Queer Euripides represents a vital step in
exploring the productive perspectives on classical literature
afforded by the critical study of orientations, identities, affects
and experiences that unsettle not only prescriptive understandings
of gender and sexuality, but also normative social structures and
relations more broadly. Bringing together twenty-one chapters by
experts in classical studies, English literature, performance and
critical theory, this carefully curated collection of incisive and
provocative readings of each surviving play draws upon queer models
of temporality, subjectivity, feeling, relationality and poetic
form to consider "queerness" both as and beyond sexuality. Rather
than adhering to a single school of thought, these close readings
showcase the multiple ways in which queer theory opens up new
vantage points on the politics, aesthetics and performative force
of Euripidean drama. They further demonstrate how the analytical
frameworks developed by queer theorists in the last thirty years
deeply resonate with the ways in which Euripides' plays twist
poetic form in order to challenge well-established modes of the
social. By establishing how Greek tragedy can itself be a resource
for theorizing queerness, the book sets the stage for a new model
of engaging with ancient literature, which challenges current
interpretive methods, explores experimental paradigms, and
reconceptualizes the practice of reading to place it firmly at the
center of the interpretive act.
New Perspectives on Power and Political Representation from Ancient
History to the Present Day offers a unique perspective on political
communication between rulers and ruled from antiquity to the
present day by putting the concept of representation center stage.
It explores the dynamic relationship between elites and the people
as it was shaped by constructions of self-representation and
representative claims. The contributors to this volume -
specialists in ancient, medieval, early-modern and modern history -
move away from reductionist associations of political
representation with formal aspects of modern, democratic,
electoral, and parliamentarian politics. Instead, they contend that
the construction of political representation involves a set of
discourses, practices, and mechanisms that, although they have been
applied and appropriated in various ways in a range of historical
contexts, has stood the test of time.
This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the
relevance of borders and bordering as a spatial paradigm in
Anglophone studies. It sets out to provide a critical
counter-narrative to the 1990s globalization argument of a
"borderless" world by insisting on the significant roles borders
play. The essays range in subject matter from geography, history,
British and American literature to painting and Reggae music and
map out different conceptualisations of the border: place, line,
process, contact zones, etc. The volume's cross-border "narrative"
serves as a point of communication between the local and the
global, between Europe and America, between different literary and
artistic genres, thus challenging the divides of geography and
literature, between "real" territorial borders and their
"fictional" counterparts.
Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics
practical and accessible introductions to the critical and
performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays
from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into
the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the
books ideal companions for study and research. Key features
include: - Essays on the play's critical and performance history -
A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play - A
selection of new essays by leading scholars - A survey of resources
to direct students' further reading about the play in print and
online Antony and Cleopatra is among Shakespeare's most enduringly
popular tragedies. A theatrical piece of extraordinary political
power, it also features one of his most memorable couples. Both
intellectually and emotionally challenging, Antony and Cleopatra
also tests the boundaries of theatrical representation. This volume
offers a stimulating and accessible guide to the play that takes
stock of the past and current situation of scholarship while
simultaneously opening up fresh, thought-provoking critical
perspectives.
The sacred and the secular in medieval literature have too often
been perceived as opposites, or else relegated to separate but
unequal spheres. In Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against
the Sacred, Barbara Newman offers a new approach to the many ways
that sacred and secular interact in medieval literature, arguing
that (in contrast to our own cultural situation) the sacred was the
normative, unmarked default category against which the secular
always had to define itself and establish its niche. Newman refers
to this dialectical relationship as "crossover"-which is not a
genre in itself, but a mode of interaction, an openness to the
meeting or even merger of sacred and secular in a wide variety of
forms. Newman sketches a few of the principles that shape their
interaction: the hermeneutics of "both/and," the principle of
double judgment, the confluence of pagan material and Christian
meaning in Arthurian romance, the rule of convergent idealism in
hagiographic romance, and the double-edged sword in parody.
Medieval Crossover explores a wealth of case studies in French,
English, and Latin texts that concentrate on instances of paradox,
collision, and convergence. Newman convincingly and with great
clarity demonstrates the widespread applicability of the crossover
concept as an analytical tool, examining some very disparate works.
These include French and English romances about Lancelot and the
Grail; the mystical writing of Marguerite Porete (placed in the
context of lay spirituality, lyric traditions, and the Romance of
the Rose); multiple examples of parody (sexually obscene,
shockingly anti-Semitic, or cleverly litigious); and Rene of
Anjou's two allegorical dream visions. Some of these texts are
scarcely known to medievalists; others are rarely studied together.
Newman's originality in her choice of these primary works will
inspire new questions and set in motion new fields of exploration
for medievalists working in a large variety of disciplines,
including literature, religious studies, history, and cultural
studies.
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