'American Tropics' refers to a kind of extended Caribbean, an area that includes the southern USA, the Atlantic littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and northern South America. European colonial powers fought intensively here against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. The regions in the American Tropics share a history in which the dominant fact is the arrival of millions of white Europeans and black Africans; share an environment that is tropical or sub-tropical; and share a socio-economic model (the plantation), whose effects lasted at least well into the twentieth century.The imaginative space of the American Tropics therefore offers a differently centred literary history from those conventionally produced as US, Caribbean, or Latin American literature. This important collection brings together essays by distinguished scholars, including the late Neil Whitehead, Richard Price, Sally Price, and Susan Gillman, that engage with the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics and that represent the rich diversity of the writing produced within this geographical area.

How did doctors argue in eighteenth-century medical pamphlet wars? How literary, or clinical, is Diderot's depiction of mad nuns? What is at stake in the account of a cataract operation at the beginning of Jean-Paul's novel Hesperus? In this pioneering volume, contributors extend current research at the intersection of medicine and literature by examining the overlapping narrative strategies in the writings of both novelists and doctors. Focusing on a wide variety of sources, an interdisciplinary team of researchers explores the nature and function of narration as an underlying principle of such writing. From a reading of correspondence between doctors as a means of continuing professional education, to the use of inoculation as a plotting device, or an examination of Diderot's physiological approach to mental illness in La Religieuse, contributors highlight: how doctors exploited rhetorical techniques in both clinical writing and correspondence with patients. how novelists incorporated medical knowledge into their narratives. how models such as case-histories or narrative poetry were adopted and transformed in both fictional and actual medical writing. how these narrative strategies shaped the way in which doctors, patients and illnesses were represented and perceived in the eighteenth century.

Few works in world literature have inspired so vast an audience, in nations with radically different languages and cultures, as the "Ramayana" and "Mahabharata", two Sanskrit verse epics written some 2,000 years ago. In "Ramayana" (written by a poet known to us as Valmiki), William Buck has retold the story of Prince Rama - with all its nobility of spirit, courtly intrigue, heroic renunciation, fierce battles, and triumph of good over evil - in a length and manner that will make the great Indian epics accessible to the contemporary reader. The same is true for the "Mahabharata" - in its original Sanskrit, probably the longest Indian epic ever composed. It is the story of a dynastic struggle, between the Kurus and Pandavas, for land. In his introduction, Sanskritist B. A. van Nooten notes, "Apart from William Buck's rendition [no other English version has] been able to capture the blend of religion and martial spirit that pervades the original epic". Presented accessibly for the general reader without compromising the spirit and lyricism of the originals, William Buck's "Ramayana" and "Mahabharata" capture the essence of the Indian cultural heritage.

Throughout Africa, oral literature is flourishing, though it is perceived by some as anachronistic to the modern world. This work refutes this idea in its entirety by presenting 22 chapters, which firmly place the study of oral literature within contemporary African existence. The study analyzes how oral literature relates to media, music, technology, text, gender, religion, power, politics and globalization.

Author, political activist and salonniere, Germaine de Stael has become the focal point of groundbreaking research in women's studies, in performing arts, and in language/translation theory. In this multidisciplinary volume, a team of scholars concentrates on the vast range of her political and cultural engagements, both during and after the French Revolution. In this collection of studies, which examine issues as diverse as citizenship, immigration, abolition or constitutional liberalism, Stael's stance as a champion of moderation against the perils of extremism and polarization comes clearly to the fore. Contributors shed new light on the Groupe de Coppet, the circle of which she was the heart, and on the cosmopolitan networks she created within and beyond Europe. Other articles underline and reassess Stael's formative influence on national cultures distant in space and time, redefining her Italianism in Corinne ou l'Italie, analysing the British reception of her Considerations and exploring the impact of De l'Allemagne on American intellectual life. Germaine de Stael: forging a politics of mediation highlights Stael's pioneering place in the history of global interaction. She emerges as a truly modern thinker as well as an agent of multicultural exchange.

From concerns of an 'autism epidemic' to the MMR vaccine crisis, autism is a source of peculiar fascination in the contemporary media. Discussion of the condition has been largely framed within medicine, psychiatry and education but there has been no exploration of its power within representative narrative forms. Representing Autism is the first book to tackle this approach, using contemporary fiction and memoir writing, film, photography, drama and documentary together with older texts to set the contemporary fascination with autism in context. Representing Autism analyses and evaluates the place of autism within contemporary culture and at the same time examines the ideas of individual and community produced by people with autism themselves to establish the ideas of autistic presence that emerge from within a space of cognitive exceptionality. Central to the book is a sense of the legitimacy of autistic presence as a way by which we might more fully articulate what it means to be human.

Out of public sight for over a hundred years, the Livre de caricatures tant bonnes que mauvaises is a remarkable work. This collection of comic and satirical drawings was created by a Parisian luxury embroiderer, Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, at a time of rigid press censorship to entertain a small group of family and friends. For today's reader the Livreprovides not only a series of richly imaginative and varied drawings, but also a fascinating and intriguing commentary on pre-Revolutionary Paris. In this first comprehensive study of the Livre de caricatures, which includes over 190 illustrations, an international team of scholars investigates the motivations and operations behind the making of the book, and the many facets of Parisian life that it illuminates. Embracing politics and religion, theatre, fashion and connoisseurship, and the court of Versailles and the Parisian streets, the scope of the Livre is immense. The work's unique quality is evident in its humour - whimsical, fantastical, challengingly allusive, but not without a sharp political edge when targeting clerics, the court and Louis XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Known within the Saint-Aubin family as the Livre de culs, the Livre delights in the transgression of social convention and the keen deflation of vanity and pretence. Contributors explore this irreverent image of eighteenth-century Paris in all its glory. In today's world, the visual satire of the Livre de Caricatures continues to resonate, instruct and entertain.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Ranging across novels and poetry, critical theory and film, comics and speeches, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds explores how writers, thinkers, and filmmakers have answered the following question: are nuclear weapons 'white'? Many texts respond in the affirmative, and arraign nuclear weapons for defending a racial order that privileges whiteness. They are seen as a reminder that the power enjoyed by the white western world imperils the whole of the Earth. Furthermore, the struggle to survive during and after a speculated nuclear attack is often cast as a contest between races and ethnic groups. Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War listens to voices from around the Anglophone world and the debates followed do not only take place on the soil of the nuclear powers. Filmmakers and writers from the Caribbean, Australia, and India take up positions shaped by their specific place in the decolonizing world and their particular experience of nuclear weapons. The texts considered in Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War encompass the many guises of representations of nuclear weapons: the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic weapons, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear tests taking place around the world, and the anxiety surrounding the superpowers' devastating arsenals. Of particular interest to SF scholars are the extensive analyses of films, novels, and short stories depicting nuclear war and its aftermath. New thoughts are offered on the major texts that SF scholars often return to, such as Philip Wylie's Tomorrow! and Pat Frank's Alas Babylon, and a host of little known and under-researched texts are scrutinized too.

Eighteenth-century Epicureanism is often viewed as radical, anti-religious and politically dangerous. But to what extent does this simplify the ancient philosophy and underestimate its significance in Enlightenment writing? Through a pan-European analysis of Enlightenment centres from Scotland to Russia via the Netherlands, France and Germany, contributors argue that elements of classical Epicureanism were appropriated by radical and conservative writers alike. They move beyond literature and political theory to examine the application of Epicurean ideas in domains as diverse as physics, natural law, and the philosophy of language, drawing on the work of both major figures (Diderot, Helvetius, Smith and Hume) and of lesser-known but equally influential thinkers (Johann Jacob Schmauss and Dmitrii Anichkov). This unique collaboration, bringing together historians, philosophers, political scientists and literary scholars, provides rich and varied insights into the different strategic uses of Epicureanism in the eighteenth century.

Few novels have caused more of a stir than Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In England, the Duchess of Abercorn stated that she divided her dinner-guests according to their view of Tess. If they deemed her "a little harlot", she put them in one group; if they said "Poor wronged innocent!", she put them in another. It is a telling illustration of the novel's word-of-mouth success. The Daily News wittily claimed that "pessimism (we had almost said Tessimism) is popular and fashionable". Fan-mail arrived: Hardy said that his mail from readers even included confessional letters from various wives who, like Tess, had gained premarital sexual experience but, unlike her, had not told their husbands of it. Hardy's fame was now so great that he was a frequent guest at fashionable dinner parties. In 1892 he recorded that Tess's fame had spread round the world and that translations were multiplying, "its publication in Russia exciting great interest". Controversy generated publicity. Publicity generated prosperity. Sales of Tess far surpassed those of any of Hardy's previous works, and between 1900 and 1930 was reprinted "some forty times in England alone". In addition to making Hardy famous and rich, the scandalous Tess attracted, and has continued to attract, an extraordinary range of critical opinion. Victorian reviewers, humanists, neo-Marxists, deconstructionists, cultural materialists, new historicists: everyone has had something to say about the novel. This book, drawing on the best of these critics, shows why, for all its faults, it has such power, and explains the angry and uncompromising vision of the world contained within its pages.

The subject of this timely book is that body of fiction which speculates in narrative form about the nature of wars likely to break out in the near or distant future. Although earlier instances occur, the origins of this mode lie primarily in the late nineteenth century but writing about future wars continues to this day with notable fiction on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ranging widely across periods and conflicts real and imagined, and boasting contributions from the late I. F. Clarke, H. Bruce Franklin and Patrick Parrinder, Future Wars explores the fascinating process of interaction between politics and literature, science fiction and war in a range of classic texts. Individual essays explore Reagan's 'star wars' project, nuclear fiction, Martian invasion, and the Pax Americana among other topics. The use of future war scenarios in military planning dates back to the nineteenth century. Future Wars concludes with an assessment by an officer in the U.S. Army of the continuing usefulness of future wars fiction.

Women and Empire, 1750-1939: Primary Sources on Gender and Anglo-Imperialism functions to extend significantly the range of the History of Feminism series (co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse), bringing together the histories of British and American women's emancipation, represented in earlier sets, into juxtaposition with histories produced by different kinds of imperial and colonial governments. The alignment of writings from a range of Anglo-imperial contexts reveals the overlapping histories and problems, while foregrounding cultural specificities and contextual inflections of imperialism. The volumes focus on countries, regions, or continents formerly colonized (in part) by Britain: Volume I: Australia Volume II: New Zealand Volume III: Africa Volume IV: India Volume V: Canada Perhaps the most novel aspect of this collection is its capacity to highlight the common aspects of the functions of empire in their impact on women and their production of gender, and conversely, to demonstrate the actual specificity of particular regional manifestations. Concerning questions of power, gender, class and race, this new Routledge-Edition Synapse Major Work will be of particular interest to scholars and students of imperialism, colonization, women's history, and women's writing.

Antonin Artaud is probably the single greatest force on the contemporary stage. In this harrowing play, Charles Marowitz draws on exclusive material obtained from friends and confidantes, depicting a series of imaginary scenes based upon the true incidents of Artaud's life and his incarceration as a madman in the asylum at Rodez. Using Artaud's own Theatre of Cruelty techniques Marowitz tells what is perhaps the cruelest story of all: the way in which society methodically destroys the maverick artist who attempts to defy it. Also included in this edition are exclusive interviews with leading avant-garde figures such as Roger Blin and Arthur Adamov as well as first-hand testimony from Artaud's own psychiatrist, Dr Gaston Ferdiere and Artaud's sister, Marie-Ange Malaussena.

Hospitality, in particular hospitality to strangers, was promoted in the eighteenth century as a universal human virtue, but writing of the period reveals many telling examples of its abuse. Through analysis of encounters across cultural and sexual divides, Judith Still revisits the current debate about the social, moral and political values of the Enlightenment. Focussing on (in)hospitality in relation to two kinds of exotic Other, Judith Still examines representations of indigenous peoples of the New World, both as hosts and as cannibals, and of the Moslem 'Oriental' in Persia and Turkey, associated with both the caravanserai (where travellers rest) and the harem. She also explores very different examples of Europeans as hosts and the practice of 'adoption', particularly that of young girls. The position of women in hospitality, hitherto neglected in favour of questions of cultural difference, is central to these analyses, and Still considers the work of women writers alongside more canonical male-authored texts. In this thought-provoking study, Judith Still uncovers how the Enlightenment rhetoric of openness and hospitality is compromised by self-interest; the questions it raises about attitudes to difference and freedom are equally relevant today.

Source d'etude mais egalement d'inspiration, l'Orient a influence de nombreux penseurs, historiens et ecrivains anglais du XVIIIe siecle, dont les textes ont contribue au developpement d'une veritable mode orientale en Angleterre. Mais parmi ces representations de l'Orient se confondent ouvrages erudits et fictifs, connaissance et imagination. Relisant un corpus de romans dits pseudo-orientaux a partir de leur intertexte savant, Claire Gallien met en evidence la deconstruction des frontieres entre textes fictifs et non-fictifs. Si le roman s'inspire de l'erudition orientaliste, celle-ci emploie des techniques de vulgarisation propres a l'ecriture romanesque. Dans L'Orient anglais C. Gallien examine le lien qui unissait une mode a un systeme de connaissance, et permet de voir le role d'une culture etrangere dans la constitution d'une litterature nationale.

Historians of eighteenth-century thought have implied a clear distinction between mystical or occult writing, often termed 'illuminist', and better-known forms of Enlightenment thinking and culture. But where are the boundaries of 'enlightened' human understanding? This is the question posed by contributors to this volume, who put forward a completely new way of configuring these seemingly antithetical currents of thought, and identify a grey area that binds the two, a 'Super-Enlightenment'. Through articles exploring the social, religious, artistic, political and scientific dimensions of the Super-Enlightenment, contributors demonstrate the co-existence of apparent opposites: the enlightened and the esoteric, empiricism and imagination, history and myth, the secretive and the public, mysticism and science. The Enlightenment can no longer be seen as a sturdy, homogeneous movement defined by certain core beliefs, but one which oscillates between opposing poles in its social practices, historiography and even its epistemology: between daring to know, and daring to know too much.

What constituted the 'private' in the eighteenth-century? In Representing private lives of the Enlightenment authors look beyond a simple equation of the private and the domestic to explore the significance of the individual and its constructions of identity and environment. Taking case studies from Russia, France, Italy and England, specialists from a range of disciplines analyse descriptions of the private situated largely outside the familial context: the nobleman at the theatre or in his study, the woman in her boudoir, portraitists and their subject, the solitary wanderer in the public garden, the penitent at confession. This critical approach provides a comparative framework that simultaneously confirms the Enlightenment as a pan-European movement, both intellectually and socially, whilst uncovering striking counterpoints. What emerges is a unique sense of how individuals from different classes and cultures sought to map their social and domestic sphere, and an understanding of the permeable boundaries separating private and public.

Did 'sex education' actually exist in eighteenth-century France? Shaped by competing currents of religious dogma, atheist materialism and bourgeois morality, eighteenth-century France marked the beginning of what Michel Foucault called 'une fermentation discursive' on matters related to sex. But when we consult the educational theorists or philosophes of the time for their opinions on preparing a young person for life as a sexual being, we are met with a telling silence. Did an Enlightenment era that dared to make sex an object of discourse also dare to make it an object of pedagogy? Sex education in eighteenth-century France brings together specialists from a range of disciplines to address these issues. Using a wide variety of literary, historical, religious and pedagogical sources, contributors explore for the first time the nexus between sex and instruction. Although these two categories were publicly kept distinct, writers were effectively shaping attitudes and behaviours. Unraveling the complex system of rules and codes through which knowledge about sex was communicated, contributors uncover a new dimension in the practice of education in the eighteenth century.

Sol Plaatje is celebrated as one of South Africa’s most accomplished political and literary figures. A pioneer in the history of the black press, editor of several newspapers, he was one of the founders of the African National Congress in 1912, led its campaign against the notorious Natives Land Act of 1913, and twice travelled overseas to represent the interests of his people. He wrote a number of books, including – in English – Native Life in South Africa (1916), a powerful denunciation of the Land Act and the policies that led to it, and a pioneering novel, Mhudi (1930). Years after his death his diary of the siege of Mafeking was retrieved and published, providing a unique view of one of the best known episodes of the South African War of 1899–1902. At the same time Plaatje was a proud Morolong, fascinated by his people’s history. He was dedicated to Setswana, and set out to preserve its traditions and oral forms so as to create a written literature. He translated a number of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana, the first in any African language, collected proverbs and stories, and even worked on a new dictionary. He fought long battles with those who thought they knew better over the particular form its orthography should take. This book tells the story of Plaatje’s remarkable life, setting it in the context of the changes that overtook South Africa during his lifetime, and the huge obstacles he had to overcome. It draws upon extensive new research in archives in southern Africa, Europe and the US, as well as an expanding scholarship on Plaatje and his writings. This biography sheds new light not only on Plaatje’s struggles and achievements but upon his personal life and his relationships with his wife and family, friends and supporters. It pays special attention to his formative years, looking to his roots in chiefly societies, his education and upbringing on a German-run mission, and his exposure to the legal and political ideas of the nineteenth-century Cape Colony as key factors in inspiring and sustaining a life of more or less ceaseless endeavour.

In the first half of the twentieth century, modernist works appeared not only in obscure little magazines and books published by tiny exclusive presses but also in literary reprint magazines of the 1920s, tawdry pulp magazines of the 1930s, and lurid paperbacks of the 1940s. In his nuanced exploration of the publishing and marketing of modernist works, David M. Earle questions how and why modernist literature came to be viewed as the exclusive purview of a cultural elite given its availability in such popular forums. As he examines sensational and popular manifestations of modernism, as well as their reception by critics and readers, Earle provides a methodology for reconciling formerly separate or contradictory materialist, cultural, visual, and modernist approaches to avant-garde literature. Central to Earle's innovative approach is his consideration of the physical aspects of the books and magazines - covers, dust wrappers, illustrations, cost - which become texts in their own right. Richly illustrated and accessibly written, Earle's study shows that modernism emerged in a publishing ecosystem that was both richer and more complex than has been previously documented.

Thresholds of Meaning examines contemporary French narrative and explores two related issues: the centrality within recent French fiction and autofiction of the themes of passage, ritual and liminality; and the thematic continuity which links this work with its literary ancestors of the 1960s and 1970s. Through the close analysis of novels and recits by Pierre Bergounioux, Francois Bon, Marie Darrieussecq, Helene Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier and Jean Rouaud, Duffy demonstrates the ways in which contemporary narrative, while capitalising on the formal lessons of the nouveau roman and drawing upon a shared repertoire of motifs and themes, engages with the complex processes by which meaning is produced in the referential world and, in particular, with the rituals and codes that social man brings into play in order to negotiate the various stages of the human life-cycle. By the application of concepts and models derived from ritual theory and from visual analysis, Thresholds of Meaning situates itself at the intersection of the developing field of literature and anthropology studies and research into word and image.

This book explores the relation between poststructuralist thought and postcoloniality, and identifies in that interaction the expression of a particular anxiety concerning the form of theoretical writing. Many so-called poststructuralist thinkers, such as Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Barthes, Kristeva and Spivak, have turned their attention at some point in their career towards questions either of postcolonialism, or of cultural domination and difference. For all these thinkers, however, a reflection on such questions has generated a sense of unease concerning the assumed neutrality of theoretical discourse, and the inevitable subjective or autobiographical investments of the writing self. The book argues that this anxiety betrays an unprecedented lucidity concerning the particular challenges of writing about ourselves and others at a time of postcolonial upheaval.

Cultural transfers between eighteenth-century France and Britain did much to shape the intellectual identity of each nation. But what were the main channels of communication? How did they function? What was their impact? In Cultural transfers: France and Britain in the long eighteenth century a team of specialists focuses on the networks and correspondences on which these exchanges were based, the concrete form they took and the material, political or ideological constraints which governed them. Particular attention is paid to the roles of: intermediaries such as diplomats, scientific institutions, or the Huguenot exiles who played a crucial part in disseminating English scientific, theological and political writings gazettes, learned periodicals, and government-sponsored journals where the French learned about British political debates and institutions translators, who could significantly alter texts in line with their own preconceptions and agendas or the expectations of their readers This multidisciplinary book moves beyond the classic concern with 'influences' of one author or culture on another. It presents a new understanding of the hidden international networks that sustained the Republic of Letters and of the synthesis that emerged through contacts and interaction between French and British culture.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This third edition of Twelfth Night retains the text edited and annotated by Elizabeth Story Donno for the first edition of 1985, and features an updated introduction by Penny Gay, which focuses on recent scholarship and performance history. Building on her Introduction to the second edition, Gay stresses the play's theatricality, its elaborate linguistic games and its complex use of Ovidian myths. She analyses the delicate balance Shakespeare strikes in Twelfth Night between romance and realism, and explores representations of gender, sexuality and identity in the text. A selection of new photographs completes the edition.

On ne peut penser les Lumieres sans l'auteur du Contrat social et l'Emile, mais on ne saurait cependant nier que Rousseau denonce les 'philosophes modernes' dans les termes les plus forts. Comment donc penser les rapports entre Rousseau et les philosophes? Dans ce volume les specialistes de Rousseau vont au-dela des oppositions figees. Ils montrent comment le 'citoyen de Geneve', a partir de sources philosophiques partagees avec ses contemporains, delimite le champ de la raison et construit une pensee politique rigoureuse, s'imposant ainsi a ceux qui souvent rejettent ses idees religieuses ou sa denonciation des sciences et des arts. Confrontant la richesse irreductible de ses ecrits, les auteurs proposent le portrait intellectuel d'un homme qui construit sa pensee a la fois avec et contre les philosophes, les obligeant a justifier ou a modifier leurs propres convictions face au defi que represente son oeuvre. Figure emblematique de son siecle, Rousseau suscite l'indignation mais oblige aussi a des reexamens difficiles. C'est par l'etude de cette position a la fois centrale et marginale que l'on peut saisir la force de sa pensee et discerner ce qu'elle signifie pour nous.