Surviving Images explores the prominent role of cinema in the development of cultural memory around war and conflict in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It does so through a study of three historical eras: the colonial period, the national-independence struggle, and the postcolonial. Beginning with a study of British colonial cinema on the Sudan, then exploring anti-colonial cinema in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, followed by case studies of films emerging from postcolonial contexts in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, this work aims to fill a gap in the critical literature on both Middle Eastern cinemas, and to contribute more broadly to scholarship on social trauma and cultural memory in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This work treats the concept of trauma critically, however, and posits that social trauma must be understood as a framework for producing social and political meaning out of these historical events. Social trauma thus sets out a productive process of historical interpretation, and cultural texts such as cinematic works both illuminate and contribute to this process. Through these discussions, Surviving Images illustrates cinema's productive role in contributing to the changing dynamics of cultural memory of war and social conflict in the modern world.

The diminishment of rural life at the hands of urbanization, for many, defines the years between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century in the U.S. Traditional literary histories find this transformation clearly demarcated between rural tales-stories set in the countryside, marked by attention to regional dialect and close-knit communities-and grittier novels and short stories that reflected the harsh realities of America's growing cities. Challenging this conventional division, Mark Storey proffers a capacious, trans-regional version of rural fiction that contains and coexists with urban-industrial modernity.
To remap literary representations of the rural, Storey pinpoints four key aspects of everyday life that recur with surprising frequency in late nineteenth-century fiction: train journeys, travelling circuses, country doctors, and lynch mobs. Fiction by figures such as Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, and William Dean Howells use railroads and roving carnivals to signify the deeper incursions of urban capitalism into the American countryside. A similar, somewhat disruptive migration of the urban into the rural occurs with the arrival of modern medicine, as viewed in depictions of the country doctor in novels like Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor and Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware. This discussion gives way to a far darker interaction between the urban and the rural, with the intricate relationship of vigilante justice to an emerging modernity used to frame readings of rural lynchings in works by writers like Bret Harte, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Owen Wister. The four arenas-transport, entertainment, medicine, and the law-used to organize the study come together in a coda devoted to utopian fiction, which demonstrates one of the more imaginative methods used to express the social and literary anxieties around the changing nature of urban and rural space at the end of the nineteenth century.
Mining a rich variety of long neglected novels and short stories, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities provides a new literary geography of Gilded Age America, and in the process, contributes to our understanding of how we represent and register the cultural complexities of modernization.

Kabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song. Scholars and translators usually attend to written collections, but these present only a partial picture of the Kabir who has remained vibrantly alive through the centuries mostly in oral forms. Entering the worlds of singers and listeners in rural Madhya Pradesh, Bodies of Song combines ethnographic and textual study in exploring how oral transmission and performance shape the content and interpretation of vernacular poetry in North India. The book investigates textual scholars' study of oral-performative traditions in a milieu where texts move simultaneously via oral, written, audio/video-recorded, and electronic pathways. As texts and performances are always socially embedded, Linda Hess brings readers into the lives of those who sing, hear, celebrate, revere, and dispute about Kabir. Bodies of Song is rich in stories of individuals and families, villages and towns, religious and secular organizations, castes and communities. Dialogue between religious/spiritual Kabir and social/political Kabir is a continuous theme throughout the book: ambiguously located between Hindu and Muslim cultures, Kabir rejected religious identities, pretentions, and hypocrisies. But even while satirizing the religious, he composed stunning poetry of religious experience and psychological insight. A weaver by trade, Kabir also criticized caste and other inequalities and today serves as an icon for Dalits and all who strive to remove caste prejudice and oppression.

A scholarly edition of the poems of Thomas Gray. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Since at least 1939, when daily-strip caveman Alley Oop time-traveled to the Trojan War, comics have been drawing (on) material from Greek and Roman myth, literature and history. At times the connection is cosmetic-as perhaps with Wonder Woman's Amazonian heritage-and at times it is almost irrelevant-as with Hercules' starfaring adventures in the 1982 Marvel miniseries. But all of these make implicit or explicit claims about the place of classics in modern literary culture.
Classics and Comics is the first book to explore the engagement of classics with the epitome of modern popular literature, the comic book. This volume collects sixteen articles, all specially commissioned for this volume, that look at how classical content is deployed in comics and reconfigured for a modern audience. It opens with a detailed historical introduction surveying the role of classical material in comics since the 1930s. Subsequent chapters cover a broad range of topics, including the incorporation of modern theories of myth into the creation and interpretation of comic books, the appropriation of characters from classical literature and myth, and the reconfiguration of motif into a modern literary medium. Among the well-known comics considered in the collection are Frank Miller's 300 and Sin City, DC Comics' Wonder Woman, Jack Kirby's The Eternals, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and examples of Japanese manga. The volume also includes an original 12-page "comics-essay," drawn and written by Eisner Award-winning Eric Shanower, creator of the graphic novel series Age of Bronze.

Adored by many, appalling to some, baffling still to others, few authors defy any single critical narrative to the confounding extent that James Baldwin manages. Was he a black or queer writer? Was he a religious or secular writer? Was he a spokesman for the civil rights movement or a champion of the individual? His critics, as disparate as his readership, endlessly wrestle with paradoxes, not just in his work but also in the life of a man who described himself as "all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin" and who declared that "all theories are suspect." Viewing Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach, All Those Strangers examines how his fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Showing how external forces molded Baldwinas personal, political, and psychological development, Douglas Field breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwinas geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin's life and work, including his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing, while also contributing to wider discussions about postwar US culture. Field deftly navigates key twentieth-century themesathe Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalismato bring a number of isolated subjects into dialogue with each other. By exploring the paradoxes in Baldwin's development as a writer, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single framework, All Those Strangers contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin's life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. By studying him as an individual and an artist in flux, Field reveals the manifold ways in which Baldwin's work develops and coheres.

Future History traces the ways that English and American writers oriented themselves along an East-West axis to fantasize their place in the world. The book builds on new transoceanic scholarship and recent calls to approach early American studies from a global perspective. Such scholarship has largely focused on the early national period; Bross's work begins earlier and considers the intertwined identities of America, other English colonial sites and metropolitan England during a period before nation-state identities were hardened into the forms we know them today, when an English empire was nascent, not realized, and when a global perspective such as we might recognize it was just coming into focus for early modern Europeans. The author examines works that imagine England on a global stage in the Americas and East Indies just as-and in some cases even before-England occupied such spaces in force. Future History considers works written from the 1620s to the 1670s, but the center of gravity of Future History is writing at the mid-century, that is, writings coincident with the Interregnum, a time when England plotted and launched ambitious, often violent schemes to conquer, colonize or otherwise appropriate other lands, driven by both mercantile and religious desires.

Ancient Greek Philosophy routinely relied upon concepts of number to explain the tangible order of the universe. Plotinus' contribution to this tradition, however, has been often omitted, if not ignored. The main reason for this, at first glance, is the Plotinus does not treat the subject of number in the Enneads as pervasively as the Neopythagoreans or even his own successors Lamblichus, Syrianus, and Proclus. Nevertheless, a close examination of the Enneads reveals that Plotinus systematically discusses number in relation to each of his underlying principles of existence--the One, Intellect, and Soul. Plotinus on Number offers the first comprehensive analysis of Plotinus' concept of number, beginning with its origins in Plato and the Neopythagoreans and ending with its influence on Porphyry's arrangement of the Enneads. It's main argument is that Plotinus adapts Plato's and the Neopythagoreans' cosmology to place number in the foundation of the intelligible realm and in the construction of the universe. Through Plotinus' defense of Plato's Ideal Numbers from Aristotle's criticism, Svetla Slaveva-Griffin reveals the founder of Neoplatonism as the first post-Platonic philosopher who purposefully and systematically develops what we may call a theory of number, distinguishing between number in the intelligible realm and number in the quantitative, mathematical realm. Finally, the book draws attention to Plotinus' concept as a necesscary and fundamental linke between Platonic and late Neoplatonic schools of philosophy.

Using examples from architecture, film, literature, and the visual arts, this wide-ranging book examines the place and significance of New York City in the urban imaginary between 1890 and 1940. In particular, Imagining New York City considers how and why certain city spaces - such as the skyline, the sidewalk, the slum, and the subway - have come to emblematize key aspects of the modern urban condition. In so doing, the book also considers the ways in which cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for more recent responses to a variety of urban challenges facing the city, such as post-disaster recovery, the renewal of urban infrastructure, and the remaking of public space.

A scholarly edition of poems by Sir Philip Sidney. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This book is a light-hearted look at life in the city of Bath in Roman times, almost two thousand years ago. Back then, the city was called Aquae Sulis (the Waters of Sul). Sul being a local goddess sacred to the tribe who lived in this region.Although the Tales and most of the characters are fictitious, the general facts about the Romans are true. Details about how they lived, what they believed, their rituals, the medicines they used (prepare to be revolted!), what they ate and what they wore have been gleaned from many reliable sources.The stories are mostly irreverent because, despite the Romans achieving many great things, the people themselves could be quite obnoxious! They kept slaves, slaughtered people and animals in the arena just for fun, and subjugated other nations in order to expand their Empire.Hence, these Tales generally poke fun at the Romans, many of whom were illiterate or semi-literate which often had dire consequences, as the Tales reveal.I hope you enjoy reading about life in Aquae Sulis and perhaps learn some little-known facts and even a bit of Latin!

Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from a number of fields across the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and consider why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period. This deep cultural need should be seen as a reaction to the rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even method of resistance, to a culture gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism, why it has so often led to unusual, challenging projects and formal innovation, and why poetry, in particular, might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the variety of forms this preoccupation takes, and examines its aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring the use of innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important strain at the heart of twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

The Methuen Drama Student Edition of Twelve Angry Men is the first critical edition of Reginald Rose's play, providing the play text alongside commentary and notes geared towards student readers. In New York, 1954, a man is dead and the life of another is at stake. A 'guilty' verdict seems a foregone conclusion, but one member of the jury has the will to probe more deeply into the evidence and the courage to confront the ignorance and prejudice of some of his fellow jurors. The conflict that follows is fierce and passionate, cutting straight to the heart of the issues of civil liberties and social justice. Ideal for the student reader, the accompanying pedagogical notes include elements such as an author chronology; plot summary; suggested further reading; explanatory endnotes; and questions for further study. The introduction discusses in detail the play's origins as a 1954 American television play, Rose's re-working of the piece for the stage, and Lumet's 1957 film version, identifying textual variations between these versions and discussing later significant productions. The commentary also situates the play in relation to the genre of courtroom drama, as a milestone in the development of televised drama, and as an engagement with questions of American individualism and democracy. Together, this provides students with an edition that situates the play in its contemporary social and dramatic contexts, while encouraging reflection on its wider thematic implications.

As Christopher Columbus surveyed lush New World landscapes, he eventually concluded that he had rediscovered the biblical garden from which God expelled Adam and Eve. Reading the paradisiacal rhetoric of Columbus, John Smith, and other explorers, English immigrants sailed for North America full of hope. However, the rocky soil and cold winters of New England quickly persuaded Puritan and Quaker colonists to convert their search for a physical paradise into a quest for Eden's less tangible perfections: temperate physiologies, intellectual enlightenment, linguistic purity, and harmonious social relations. Scholars have long acknowledged explorers' willingness to characterize the North American terrain in edenic terms, but Inventing Eden pushes beyond this geographical optimism to uncover the influence of Genesis on the iconic artifacts, traditions, and social movements that shaped seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American culture. Harvard Yard, the Bay Psalm Book, and the Quaker use of antiquated pronouns like thee and thou: these are products of a seventeenth-century desire for Eden. So, too, are the evangelical emphasis of the Great Awakening, the doctrine of natural law popularized by the Declaration of Independence, and the first United States judicial decision abolishing slavery. From public nudity to Freemasonry, a belief in Eden affected every sphere of public life in colonial New England and, eventually, the new nation. Spanning two centuries and surveying the work of English and colonial thinkers from William Shakespeare and John Milton to Anne Hutchinson and Benjamin Franklin, Inventing Eden is the history of an idea that shaped American literature, identity, and culture.

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to help students track their learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping students to reach their potential.

This volume contains interviews with fourteen contemporary South African authors: Mariam Akabor, Sifiso Mzobe, Fred Khumalo, Futhi Ntshingila, Niq Mhlongo, Zukiswa Wanner, Nthikeng Mohlele, Mohale Mashigo, Lauren Beukes, Charlie Human, Yewande Omotoso, Andrew Salomon, Imraan Coovadia and Fred Strydom. The conversations with the writers are accompanied by vignettes of the authors' lives and summaries of their works. In curating this book, Danyela Dimakatso Demir and Olivier Moreillon step beyond pure literary theory and analysis by allowing the authors to speak to and assess the literary landscape, of which they form a part and which they co-create. However, Demir and Moreillon also trace concepts and terms that describe the current moment of South African literature, such as post-transitional literature and literature beyond 2000. By adopting a world-literary approach to (post)apartheid literature, this book makes an important contribution to debates on contemporary South African writing. In addition, Tracing the (Post)Apartheid Novel beyond 2000 seeks to raise awareness of the imbalance in both critical and public attention between literary 'big names', such as Andre P. Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Zakes Mda, who are nationally and internationally celebrated, and the younger and newer generation of South African writers, who go largely unnoticed.

Biographies of America's greatest humorist abound, but none have charted the overall influence of the key male friendships that profoundly informed his life and work. Combining biography, literary history, and gender studies, Mark Twain and Male Friendship presents a welcome new perspective as it examines three vastly different friendships and the stamp they left on Samuel Clemens's life.
With accessible prose informed by impressive research, the study provides an illuminating history of the friendships it explores, and the personal and cultural dynamic of the relationships. In the case of Twain and his pastor, Joseph Twichell, emphasis is put on the latter's role as mentor and spiritual advisor and on Twain's own waning sense of religious belonging. Messent then shifts gears to consider Twain's friendship with fellow author and collaborator William Dean Howells. Fascinating in its own right, this relationship also serves as a prism through which to view the literary marketplace of nineteenth-century America. A third, seemingly unlikely friendship between Twain and Standard Oil executive H.H. Rogers focuses on Twain's attitude toward business and shows how Rogers and his wife served as a surrogate family for the novelist after the death of his own wife.
As he charts these relationships, Messent uses existing work on male friendship, gender roles, and cultural change as a framework in which to situate altered conceptions of masculinity and of men's roles, not just in marriage but in the larger social networks of their time. In sum, Mark Twain andMale Friendship is not only a valuable new resource on the great novelist but also a lively cultural history of male friendship in nineteenth-century America.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-eight original essays, by an international team of scholar-critics, to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. Nineteen essays explore the highlights of a long career systematically, giving special prominence to the lyric Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes and to the blank verse poet of 'The Recluse'. Most of the other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

Ends of Assimilation compares sociological and Chicano/a (Mexican American) literary representations of assimilation. It argues that while Chicano/a literary works engage assimilation in complex, often contradictory ways, they manifest an underlying conviction in literature's productive power. At the same time, Chicano/a literature demonstrates assimilation sociology's inattention to its status as a representational discourse. As twentieth-century sociologists employ the term, assimilation reinscribes as fact the fiction of a unitary national culture, ignores the interlinking of race and gender in cultural formation, and valorizes upward economic mobility as a politically neutral index of success. The study unfolds chronologically, describing how the historical formation of Chicano/a literature confronts the specter of assimilation discourse. It tracks how the figurative, rhetorical, and lyrical power of Chicano/a literary works compels us to compare literary discourse with the self-authorizing empiricism of assimilation sociology. It also challenges presumptions of authenticity on the part of Chicano/a cultural nationalist works, arguing that Chicano/a literature must reckon with cultural dynamism and develop models of relational authenticity to counter essentialist discourses. The book advances these arguments through sustained close readings of canonical and noncanonical figures and gives an account of various moments in the history and institutional development of Chicano/a literature, such as the rise and fall of Quinto Sol Publications, asserting that Chicano/a writers, editors, and publishers have self-consciously sought to acquire and redistribute literary cultural capital.

No aspect of modernist literature has attracted more passionate defenses, or more furious denunciations, than its affinity for the idea of autonomy. A belief in art as a law unto itself is central to the work of many writers from the late nineteenth century to the present. But is this belief just a way of denying art's social contexts, its roots in the lives of its creators, its political and ethical obligations?
Fictions of Autonomy argues that the concept of autonomy is, on the contrary, essential for understanding modernism historically. Disputing the prevailing skepticism about autonomy, Andrew Goldstone shows that the pursuit of relative independence within society is modernism's distinctive way of relating to its contexts. Goldstone examines an expansive modernist field in fiction, poetry, and theory--Oscar Wilde, J.-K. Huysmans, Henry James, Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes, Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man--in order to reveal an ever-shifting preoccupation with autonomy. Drawing on Bourdieu's sociology, formalist reading, and historical contextualization, this book demonstrates the importance of autonomy to modernist themes as varied as domestic service, artistic aging, expat life, and non-referentiality.
Nothing less than an argument for a wholesale revision of the assumptions of modernist studies, Fictions of Autonomy is also an intervention in literary theory. This book shows why anyone interested in literary history, the sociology of culture, and aesthetics needs to take account of the social, stylistic, and political significance of the problem, and the potential, of autonomy.

This book explores representations of fathers in select South African novels published from the birth of apartheid to the post-transitional moment.

Father figures in the texts reflect political and social climates in South Africa – at different times representing the oppressive apartheid government, righteous and authoritative liberation leaders and the unfulfilled promise of a democratic South Africa. Grant Andrews examines how father characters are linked to storytelling; they narrate the lives of their children and their patriarchal power is constituted through narratives. He features authors such as Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, K. Sello Duiker, Mark Behr, Zoë Wicomb, Lisa Fugard and Zukiswa Wanner.

Stories of Fathers, Stories of the Nation also investigates how fatherhoods are being reimagined in light of shifting discourses of gender and identity. More recent novels have deconstructed the father figure and his paternal narrative power, representing conflicts around racial identity, sexuality, legacy and how the sins of the father are visited on his children.

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop your analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to track your learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping you to succeed.

Sitney analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage and Gertrude Stein. The films discussed span the sixty years since the Second World War. With three chapters each devoted to Stan Brakhage and Robert Beavers, two each to Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas, and single chapters on Marie Menken, Ian Hugo, Andrew Noren, Warren Sonbert, Su Friedrich, Ernie Gehr, and Abigail Child, Eyes Upside Down is the fruit of Sitney's lifelong study of visionary aspirations of the American avant-garde cinema. Sitney's earlier book and critical essays defined the field of serious criticism of the American film avant-garde. He supplies a unique approach, critical, formal and intellectual, rather than sociological, ideological or institutional. Like his earlier book, Eyes Upside Down is a dense, sustained blast of convincing criticism which unfolds through a compelling personal vision. It makes a serious contribution to cinema studies and it is sure to remain in circulation for many years to come.