1) This book contains the original letters exchanged between Rabindranath Tagore and James Henry Cousins. 2) It explores their shared ideas on culture, art, and education in India along with anti-imperialism. 3) This book will be of interest to department of South Asian literature, modern history, cultural studies, comparative literature, education, India studies, South Asian Studies, Irish studies, political studies, and the Bengali diaspora across the world.

Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer's strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted - absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! - to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Gogol to Goncharov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed introduces a brilliant and distinctive new voice: comic, humane, charming, poignant and completely, and unpretentiously, full of an infectious love for literature.

Ties in with #metoo movement so has very broad potential appeal Blends contemporary examples with Shakespearean texts so will appeal to students Written in a very accessible style so appropriate for courses Focuses on three of Shakespeare's most commonly studied texts so will slot easily into courses

Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare's original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises 'the play' is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink

Immortalized in death by The Clash, Pablo Neruda, Salvador Dali, Dmitri Shostakovich and Lindsay Kemp, Federico Garcia Lorca's spectre haunts both contemporary Spain and the cultural landscape beyond. This study offers a fresh examination of one of the Spanish language's most resonant voices; exploring how the very factors which led to his emergence as a cultural icon also shaped his dramatic output. The works themselves are also awarded the space that they deserve, combining performance histories with incisive textual analysis to restate Lorca's presence as a playwright of extraordinary vision, in works such as: Blood Wedding The Public The House of Bernarda Alba Yerma. Federico Garcia Lorca is an invaluable new resource for those seeking to understand this complex and multifaceted figure: artist, playwright, director, poet, martyr and in the eyes of many, Spain's 'national dramatist'.

This book describes how three of the most significant Anglophone writers of the first half of the twentieth century - Yeats, Eliot, and Woolf - wrestled with a geopolitical situation in which national boundaries had come to seem increasingly permeable at the same time as war among (and within) individual nation-states had come to seem virtually inescapable. Drawing on Jean-Francois Lyotard's analysis of the elements of performativity in J.L. Austin's speech act theory, and making critical use of Carl Schmitt's writings on sovereignty and world order, Miller situates the writings of Yeats, Eliot, and Woolf in the context of what Lyotard describes as a "civil war of language." By virtue of its dissolution of any clear boundary between "interiority" and "exteriority," as well as by virtue of its resistance to any decisive form of resolution or regulation, this "civil war of language" takes on dimensions that are ultimately global in scope. Miller examines the emergence of modernism as bound up with a crisis of personal, political, and aesthetic sovereignty that undermined traditional distinctions between the public and private. In the process, he directly engages with the theoretical discourse surrounding the geopolitical impact of globalization and biopolitics: a discourse that is central to the influential and widely-debated work of such varied figures as Carl Schmitt, Hardt and Negri, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned not only with twentieth-century literature but also with questions of nationalism and globalization.

The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama historicizes the Tower of London's evolving meanings in English culture alongside its representation in twenty-four English history plays, 1579-c.1634, by Thomas Legge; Robert Greene; William Shakespeare; Shakespeare and John Fletcher; George Peele; Christopher Marlowe; Anthony Munday et. al; Munday, Michael Drayton, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathway; Thomas Heywood; Thomas Dekker and John Webster; Samuel Rowley; Robert Davenport; John Ford; and unknown authors. While Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I fashioned the Tower as a showplace of royal authority, magnificence, and entertainment, these playwrights revealed the Tower's instability as a royal symbol and represented it, instead, as an emblem of opposition to the crown and as a bodily and spiritual icon of non-royal English identity.

This book focuses on the migrations and metamorphoses of black bodies, practices and discourses around the Atlantic, particularly with regard to current issues such as questions of identity, political and human rights, cosmopolitics, and mnemo-history.

Art Talk, Politics Talk looks at a deep issue, whether art should be in the service of political ends or be free to roam on its own and burgeon to the beat of the artist's perspective. Should art inform politics, or should it be the reverse? From the introductory thoughthow to talk about art in a politically demanding milieuto meditations on writers ranging from J.M. Coetzee to Nelson Mandela, Salman Rushdie to Nadine Gordimer, Art Talk, Politics Talk offers a continually surprising, consistently intellectual, and boldly original consideration of literary-cultural tradition and innovation that in many ways is a model for the world. The essays, self-contained yet cumulative in their argument and insight, locate ethical and aesthetic challenges in the postcolonial condition of our times, both in post-apartheid South Africa and globally. Teasing out the intricate value of literary culture in contemporary society, the author, in lucid prose, brings to this volume a new confidence and cri

One of South Africa's best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC's diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile. This volume spans La Guma's political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma's exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century.

Edgar Allan Poe is today considered one of the greatest masters and most fascinating figures of the American literary world. However, an examination of Poe's essays and criticism throughout his prose publishing career (1831-1849) reveals that the author himself played a vital role in the creation and manipulation of his own reputation.

During his twenties and thirties, Poe promoted his writing to magazine editors in the United States and in Europe through several strategies. He painted a Romantic and patriotic self-portrait in his fiery literary reviews, even as he played up his own connections, both real and imaginary, to literary celebrities including Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, George Gordon Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through recycling plots, atmosphere, and language (including his own) from American and British magazines, he built stories and essays which were linked in a complex network of references to each other and their author.

Teachers and studentsalike will enjoy this single-volume treatment of Poe's self-promotional tales and criticism.

Currently no work which focuses exclusively on the migrant voice in cultural or literary responses to Brexit. Engages with several overlapping socio-political and cultural issues, and approaches Brexit from an ambitious and diverse range of academic disciplines and perspectives. Chapters from a variety of European countries/voices, not previously compiled into one book. Provides an important cultural account of British-European relations.

The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) are rare and fragile documents which present a unique view of Romantic-era Britain. An energetic woman, Inchbald achieved fame as an actress, novelist, playwright and critic. Her career introduced her to a wide group of people and she counted William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble among her friends. Published here for the first time, her eleven surviving diaries are a fascinating vignette of everyday life in the theatrical and literary circles of eighteenth-century London. They record Inchbald's reading habits, social contacts and professional activities, itemize her day-to-day expenditure, and chart the development of current affairs such as the Napoleonic Wars and the trial of Queen Caroline. The diaries are fully transcribed, but a sense of the original documents is preserved through selected photographic reproductions, and descriptions of the physical notebooks. The editorial apparatus also contextualises the diaries and provides biographical details for Inchbald and the other figures she encountered. Full editorial apparatus includes a substantial general introduction, a chronology of Inchbald's life, brief introductions to each diary, bibliographical guides to figures mentioned, and textual notes. There is a consolidated index in the final volume.

Naomi Mitchison's adventures span the 20th century. This is the story of how she integrated her public and creative life as a prominent author and political activist with her private and intimate life as a woman. Brought up to be an Edwardian lady, she became a feminist and socialist maverick in the late twenties. Together with her husband Dick Mitchison, Labour MP then Lord, she explored the by-ways of what is now called an open marriage.

This study examines the unique cultural space of Victorian cathedral towns as they appear in the literary work of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, arguing that Dickens and Trollope use the cathedral town's enclosure, and its overt connections between sacred and secular, present and past, as an ideal locus from which to critique Victorian religious attitudes, aesthetic anxieties, business practices, and even immigration. By displacing these issues from the metropolis, these social authors defamiliarize them, raising what might have been considered strictly urban problems to the level of national crises.

By situating contemporary debates in cathedral towns, Dickens and Trollope complicate the restrictive dichotomy between urban and rural space often drawn by contemporary critics and Victorian fiction writers alike.

In this book, Bridgham focuses on the appearance of three such key concerns appearing in the cathedral towns of each writer: religious fragmentation, the social value of artistic labor, and the Gothic revival. Dickens and Trollope reject Romantic nostalgia by concentrating on the ancient, yet vital (as opposed to ruined) edifices of the cathedrals, and by demonstrating ways in which modern sensibilities, politics, and comforts supersede the values of the cloister. In this sense, their cathedral towns are not idealized escapes; rather, they reflect the societies of which they are a part.

Socrates (469-399 BC) is one of history's most enigmatic figures. Our knowledge of him comes to us second-hand, primarily from the philosopher Plato, who was Socrates' most gifted student, and from the historian and sometime-philosopher Xenophon, who counted himself as a member of Socrates' inner circle of friends. We also hear of Socrates in one comic play produced during his lifetime (Aristophanes' Clouds) and in passing from the philosopher Aristotle, a student of Plato.

Socrates is a figure of enduring interest. He is often considered the father of Western Philosophy, yet the four most famous accounts we have of him present a contradictory, confusing picture. Just who was Socrates? A brilliant philosopher, at times confounding and infuriating, morally serious and yet ironic; the ever-worldly man, sometime mystic, and uncommon martyr depicted by Plato? Or did Plato conflate Socrates' views with his own startling genius, as Aristotle suggests? Was So rates instead the less impressive, more mundane man whose commonsense impressed the laconic Xenophon? Or was Socrates the charlatan, the long-winded phony of Aristophanes' play?

The Socratic works of Diogenes Laertius (3rd century AD), Libanius (AD 314 -- c. 393), Maximus of 'Tyre (2nd century AD), and Apuleius (born c. AD 125) add important dimensions to the portrait of Socrates: Diogenes Laertius' Life of Socrates emphasizes Socrates' deep ethical nature and his extraordinary personality; Libanius' Apology of Socrates is based on sources now lost to us; Maximus of Tyre's Whether Socrates Did the Right Thing When He Did Not Defend Himself makes the star ling claim (against testimony of Plato and Xenophon) that Socrates never spoke athis own trial; from Apuleius' On the God of Socrates we hear at length of Socrates' infamous daimonion: the "divine sign" only mentioned elsewhere, the sign that warned Socrates against certain courses of action. In short, from these four texts we are reintroduced to Socrates, and new wrinkles are added to an already intriguing historical figure.

This multi-genre collection of chapters presents the dramatic transformation of English Studies in India since the early 1990s. It showcases the shift from the study of mainly British literature and language to a more versatile terrain of multilingualism, culture, performance, theory, and the literary Global South. Tracing this transition, the volume discusses themes like Indian literary history, postcolonial theory, post-pandemic challenges to literary studies, the state of Indian English drama, vernacular literature in English Studies and pedagogy, translations of feminist writers from South Asia, caste, and othering in literature, among other key themes. The volume, with contributions from eminent English Studies scholars, not only reflects the altered terrain of English Language and Literature in India but also invites readers to think about the transformative potential of the present juncture for both literary imagination and literary studies. This timely book, in honour of Professor GJV Prasad, will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English Studies, cultural studies, literature, comparative literature, translation studies, postcolonial studies, and critical theory.

Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems-selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay. Among the essays included here are: "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" "I Am Your Sister" Excerpts from the American Book Award-winning A Burst of Light The poems are drawn from Lorde's nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are: "Martha" "A Litany for Survival" "Sister Outsider" "Making Love to Concrete"

Learn why Cicero is considered one of the most important individuals in all of Western culture! Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) was a poet, philosopher, writer, scholar, barrister, statesman, patriot, and the linguist who helped make Latin into a universal language. His many influences in rhetoric, politics, literature, and ideas are seen throughout Western civilization. Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture explores the fascinating man behind the eloquence and his monumental effect on language, morality, and popularity of Western culture. One of the leading authorities on popular culture, Dr. Marshall Fishwick discusses the multifaceted man who may be, besides Jesus, the central figure in all of Western civilization. The author recounts his own personal quest of traveling the land and ancient cities of Italy, gleaning insights from people he met along the way who have knowledge about Cicero's life and times. However, Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture is more than a simple search for the man and his accomplishments, a man whose mere words changed the way people think. This book shows in each of us the roots of our own ideas, beliefs, and culture. Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture discusses: Cicero's rise to acclaim his affect on the language of popular culture common traits Cicero shared with Thomas Jefferson rhetoric, the art of oratory community two pivotal essays on friendship and old age vision of his reputation the search for peace Marshall McLuhan, Ciceronian Cicero's Rome Cicero's ancestral home of Arpinum Julius Caesar, politics, and the influences of Cicero the Roman republic and its downfall America as the new Rome much more! Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture is a startling, entertaining examination of the man who made Western culture what it is today. The book is insightful reading for educators, students, or anyone interested in one of the major forces in popular culture.

From Plato's dismissal of food as a distraction from thought to Kant's relegation of the palate to the bottom of the hierarchy of the senses, the sense of taste has consistently been devalued by Western aesthetics. Kant is often invoked as evidence that philosophers consider taste as an inferior sense because it belongs to the realm of the private and the subjective and does not seem to be required in the development of higher types of knowledge. From a gastrosophical perspective, however, what Kant perceives as a limitation becomes a new field of enquiry that investigates the dialectics of diet and discourse, self and matter, inside and outside. The essays in this book examine the importance of food as a pivotal element - both materially and conceptually - in the history of the Western avant-garde. From Gertrude Stein to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett, from F.T. Marinetti to Andy Warhol, from Marcel Duchamp to Eleanor Antin, the examples chosen explore the conjunction of art and foodstuff in ways that interrogate contemporary notions of the body, language and subjectivity.

Shakespeare wrote for a theater in which the audience was understood to be, and at times invited to be, active and participatory. How have Shakespeare's audiences, from the sixteenth century to the present, responded to that invitation? In what ways have consumers across different cultural contexts, periods, and platforms engaged with the performance of Shakespeare's plays? What are some of the different approaches taken by scholars today in thinking about the role of Shakespeare's audiences and their relationship to performance? The chapters in this collection use a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theater, film, radio, and digital media. The approaches that these contributors take look at Shakespeare's audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare's audiences and a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.

Mushroom Clouds: Ecocritical Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia examines the growing significance of the eco-implications of the increasing militarism of East Asia. As a transcultural image and metaphor, mushroom clouds signify anthropogenic violence and destruction, as exemplified by wars and nuclear bombings. Immediately evoking memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mushroom clouds metaphor has deep roots and implications in East Asia, and this volume explores these roots and implications from the perspectives of a variety of scholars and artists from different parts of East Asia. The chapters that comprise Mushroom Clouds respond to the increasingly dangerous developments in the world that led up to and have occurred since the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, developments that threaten the stability of the region and the world. In the wake of the 70th anniversary of the division of Korea, increasing attention has been focused on the legacy of the Cold War, on the one hand, and on the continuing militarization of East Asia, on the other. After the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the truce across the 38th parallel, after the shelling of Kinmen and Matsu, East Asia became (and remains) one of the most densely militarized regions in the world. Under the shadow of war, however, the concern about environmental impacts has been growing, not only in social discourse but also in literature and the visual arts. The first of its kind, Mushroom Clouds gathers ecocritics from East Asia to examine issues such as militarization, militarized islands, military tourism, military villages, post-war environments, nuclear accidents, and the demilitarized sone (DMZ) wildlife, among others, in East Asia.

ground-breaking: challenges the "linguistic only" category of translation and provides an interdisciplinary and broader understanding of what translation is, what it does, how, and where. highly interdisciplinary and collaborative and will therefore appeal to anyone interested in translation across a range of approaches and disciplines, from comparative literature to semiotics. there are no books on the market that bring the historical, spatial, and material aspects of translation studies into dialogue with each other within the same volume.

English writers have a way of invoking paternal imagery when thinking of Chaucer. "The Medieval word for a Poet, was a Maker," said G.K Chesterton, and "there was never a man who was more of a maker than Chaucer. He made a national language; he came very near to making a nation. At least without him it would probably have been neither so fine a language or so great a nation. Shakespeare and Milton were the greatest sons of their country; but Chaucer was the father of his country, rather in the manner of George Washington." A sweeping claim, maybe, but with a nucleus of truth. Chaucer really was a kind of English founding father. He didn't invent the language for literature but he chose it - and put his energy into exploiting and developing it. And The Canterbury Tales is where it happened. The Canterbury Tales was truly original. Chaucer's narrators, pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, range from a knight to a wealthy landowner, a merchant, a miller and minor church officials. They are brought to life by vivid descriptions of their clothing, bodily appearance and behaviour - and through the wide variety of English vernacular they voice. These are the raw materials out of which Chaucer not only produces comedy but develops themes like the condition of the church, the conflict between fate and free will, and what it is that constitutes authority, whether in the Bible or the conventions of courtly-love romance. In 1478, the printer William Caxton thought it to be such an English monument that he invested a fortune in time and money to publish The Canterbury Tales as the first ever book in English to be printed in England. It has never been out of print since.

This book examines U.S. multiculturalism from the perspective of Asian American writings, drawing contrasts between politically acquiescent multiculturalism and politically conscious multiculturalism. Chae discusses the works of writers who have highlighted a critical awareness of Asian Americans' social and economic status and their position as 'unassimilable aliens', 'yellow perils', 'coolies', 'modern-day high tech coolies', or as a 'model minority', which were ideologically woven through the complex interactions of capital and labor in the U.S. cultural and labor history. Chae suggests that more productive means of analysis must be brought to the understanding of Asian American writings, many of which have been attempting to raise awareness of the politicizing effects of U.S. multiculturalism.