Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky is one of the most celebrated poets of our time, preoccupied with the the nature and destiny of poetry in our era. This volume analyzes Brodsky's career in terms of key elegies and investigates the critical role of elegiac thinking in postmodernist poetics. In his elegies for poetic ancestors, family, friends, and the self, Brodsky demonstrates a concern for a paradox that is at the heart of modern elegiac poetry: attempting to find a basis for consolation in the face of death, but at length being compelled to discard traditional consolations, such as religion or art. The only source of relief is language itself, which Brodsky saw as both the origin and the final repository of values and truths.

"Shakespeare and Masculinity in Southern Fiction "advances the idea that" "American, Southern, white, planter class authors have appropriated models and modes of masculinity from William Shakespeare. Keener traces the history of this appropriation and its attendant masculinities from authors as early as William Gilmore Simms, through Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, to William Faulkner. This project distinctively ignores artificial divisions of literary studies, circumventing place and time in search of meaning. The work's inter-textual and inter-cultural approach affords a unique perspective on how masculinity is defined, modified by cultural circumstances, and expressed in succeeding literature. This far-reaching book bridges Shakespearean, American Southern, cultural materialist, and gender studies; offering a critical reappraisal. ""

This scholarly study presents a new political Wordsworth: an artist interested in "autonomous" poetry's redistribution of affect. No slave of Whig ideology, Wordsworth explores emotion for its generation of human experience and meaning. He renders poetry a critical instrument that, through acute feeling, can evaluate public and private life.

The first comprehensive critical history of 'SF' for thirty years, The History of Science Fiction traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece, via its rebirth in the Seventeenth-century, up to the present day. It covers both literary SF and cinema/TV. The author is both an academic literary critic and an acclaimed creative writer of science fiction. Written in lively, accessible prose, this study is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and the SF fandom, and will be lively reading for anyone interested in SF.

In this book, ten leading commentators explore the interfaces between art and aesthetics in dialogue with a philosophical text (Theodor Adorno's draft introduction to "Aesthetic Theory"), a piece of literary writing (Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy"), and a major contemporary painting (Gerhard Richter's "Betty," 1988).

How can we develop a cultural theory starting with the basic insight that human beings are "storytelling animals"? Within literary studies, narratology is a highly developed field. However, literary historians have not paid much attention to the large and small stories abounding in everyday discourse, guiding all kinds of social activity, and providing common ground for whole societies-but also fueling controversies and hostilities. Moreover, "narrative" is not only a scholarly category but has come into use in many fields of social activity as a tool for cultural self-fashioning. This book is based on the assumption that to a large extent, social dynamics is modeled in an aesthetic manner via narratives. It explores the narrative organization of cultural spaces and time-frames, the mythological shaping of communities and adversaries, and the co-production of narratives and institutions aimed at stabilizing social life. In this framework, the epistemological problem looms large of how an instrument as unreliable as narrative can participate in the creation of a social consensus regarding truth. This problem endows the general topics explored in this book with a particularly contemporary dimension.

By reading key Carter texts alongside their Decadent intertexts, Tonkin interrogates the claim that Carter was in thrall to a fetishistic aesthetic antithetical to her feminism. Through historical contextualization of the woman-as-doll, muse and femme fatale, Tonkin tests Carter's own description of her fiction as a form of literary criticism.

This book takes up the question of Christian queer theology and ethics through the contested lens of "redemption." Starting from the root infinitive "to deem," the authors argue that queer lives and struggles can illuminate and re-value the richness of embodied experience that is implied in Christian incarnational theology and ethics. Offering a set of virtues gleaned from contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and asexual (LGBTIQA) lives and communities, this book introduces a new framework of ethical reasoning. Battered and wrongly condemned by life-denying theologies of redemption and dessicating ethics of virtue, this book asserts that the resilience, creativity, and epistemology manifesting in queer lives and communities are essential to a more generous and liberative Christian theology. In this book, queer "virtues" not only reveal and re-value queer soul but expose covert viciousness in the traditional (i.e., inherently colonial and racist, and thus ungodly) "family values" of dominant Christian ethics and theology. It argues that such re-imagining has redemptive potential for Christian life writ large, including the redemption of God. This book will be a key resource for scholars of queer theology and ethics as well as queer theory, gender and race studies, religious studies, and theology more generally.

"Language Through Literature" provides a definitive introduction to the English language through the medium of English literature. Through the use of illustrations from poetry, prose and drama, this book offers a lively guide to important concepts and techniques in English language study.
Among the many topics covered in the book are the form and meaning of words, the structure of narrative discourses and the organization of dialogue and conversation. Each chapter explores a specific aspect of the modern English language using a combination of exposition and practical activities. Each chapter also provides points for further discussion and includes project work for use individually, or as part of a group.
Readers will find the author's selection and presentation of topics helpful, as Paul Simpson progressively widens the scope of topics from single words to the structure of whole conversations. "Language Through Literature" is designed for the non-specialist who is new to the study of the English language and will be particularly relevant to anyone interested in the in the relationship between the English language and English literature.

This book offers a selection of papers on Russian literature, of the Soviet period, presented at the IVth World Congress for Soviet and East European studies in 1990. The papers range from studies of the experimental prose and drama of the 1920s and early 1930s to examinations of the cruel realism of some young writers of the Gorbachev era, and of the way that Stalin and Stalinism are now being represented in Russian literature in the age of glasnost, with art spurring historians out to seek answers to questions about Russia's recent past.

Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction explores how much technology has reshaped feminist conversations in the decades since Donna Haraway's influential "Cyborg Manifesto" was published. With sections exploring reproductive technologies, new ways of imagining femininity and motherhood via artificial means, queer readings of gender as a social technology, and posthuman visions of a world beyond gender, this book demonstrates how feminist speculative fiction offers an urgently needed response to the intersections of women's bodies and technology. This collection brings together authors from Europe, Japan, the US and the UK to consider speculative films and texts, reproductive technologies and food futures, and opportunities to rethink family, aging, gender and sexuality, and community through feminist speculative fiction, a social technology for building better futures.

Language has a primary importance in Jungian psychology and its practice. C. G. Jung saw every act of speech as a psychic event. Even the "worker" words in language, like prepositions or conjunctions, carry particular archetypal energies, working dynamically and daimonically in the conduct of transformational narrative and realizing both personal and collective purposes. This book aims to deepen our consciousness of psyche's speech as it occurs in our professional discourses, in the psychoanalytic encounter, in dreams, fairy tales, myths and poetry. Vividly exploring the grammar of psyche, we are urged to constantly kindle and rekindle our engagement with language.

This book addresses the narrative construction of Russian cultural memory in the work of Julian Barnes. It investigates how Barnes's texts tend to display a memory process as a transcultural mode of the creation of English and Russian national identities. Examining a need to revisit Russian canonical works, the detailed discursive analysis of the selected English texts exposes an intertextual remembering by duplication, thus contributing to the prevention of forgetting through the recuperation of still misrecollected cultural meanings. By creatively incorporating Russian intertextual elements into his work as a novelist, the author seems to insist on sweeping across and beyond national boundaries, revealing how frail the invention of tradition is when leading to the illusion of a solid collective memory and its political legitimation. The book considers not only a constructive dialogue between Barnes's fiction and Russian classical literature, but also this writer's interpretative, mostly imaginative, integration of Russian literature and culture into his work as a novelist. Exploring the double meaning of a literary metaphor as a mnemonic image of memory and a product of imagination, it offers a comprehensive analysis of Barnes's texts which play with intertextuality as an efficient tool of displacement of official memory, providing a deeper understanding of historical and cultural processes related to the constantly moving architecture of transcultural memory.

- This is the first book of its kind to review a series of contemporary novels in English through the prism of the critical and theoretical categories of grievability and ungrievability. In the wake of Judith Butler's work on (un-)grievable groups, it addresses the ways in which fiction in English since the 1990s operates in its singularity to delve into the socio-cultural construction of grievability, thereby refining and displacing the more traditional categories of subalternity, inaudibility and invisibility associated with the poetics of postmodernism. - It also considers these categories in relation with the neighbouring issues of visibility and invisibility, ultimately providing a welcome prism though which to envisage such secular forms as the obituary and the elegy. Such genres provide means to perform mourning or, conversely, postulate an ethics of melancholia through continuing attachment to the departed. - Central to the objectives of this volume is the idea of providing an analysis of how Butler's influential categories may be of specific use to literary scholars all the more so as, in our post-trauma age, this traditional function of literature has brought to the fore such aspects of grievability as the influence of race, class, gender and/or sexual orientation in the determination of the grievability or ungrievability of the human beings exposed to individual or collective violence. - More concretely, this book uses the prism of (un-)grievability to contribute to the study of the ethics and politics of literature, taking on board the ethics and politics of form. It shows how some fictions delve into the lives of those considered ungrievable and are submitted to invisibility and/or illicit dead, while, in perpetrator trauma fictions, it is the perpetrators themselves whose refusal or impossibility to acknowledge the harm done to others under warfare conditions, foster a relation of spectrality that transforms the unfairly killed into ghosts who cannot be laid down to rest. - The essays collected in this volume relate the relevance of the above-mentioned critical and theoretical categories to various cultural areas of the English-speaking world, charting the singularities and common concerns of an array of contemporary texts and themes relating to various grounds of relegation and invisibilisation.

1) Awakening is a unique book because it looks at the freedom movement and its key landmarks through the prism of Urdu literature. 2) This English translation It is originally written in Urdu by Gopi Chand Narang, author of numerous pathbreaking scholarly books. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of English Literature, Modern Indian history and South Asian Studies across UK.

The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada explores the exciting world of nonfiction writing about the self, designed to give teachers and students the tools they need to study both canonical and lesser-known works. The volume introduces important texts and contexts for interpreting life narratives, demonstrates the conceptual tools necessary to understand what life narratives are and how they work, and offers an historical overview of key moments in Canadian auto/biography. Not sure what life writing in Canada is, or how to study it? This critical introduction covers the tools and approaches you require in order to undertake your own interpretation of life writing texts. You will encounter nonfictional writing about individual lives and experiences-including biography, autobiography, letters, diaries, comics, poetry, plays, and memoirs. The volume includes case studies to provide examples of how to study and research life narratives and toolkits to help you apply what you learn. The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada provides instructors and students with the contexts and the critical tools to discover the power of life writing, and the skills to study any kind of nonfiction, from Canada and around the world.

Nietzsche and Irish Modernism demonstrates how the ideas of the controversial German philosopher played a crucial role in the emergence and evolution of a distinctly Irish brand of modernist culture. Making an essential new contribution to the history of modernism, the book traces the circulation of these ideas through the writings of George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as through minor works of literature, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence. These materials reveal a response to Nietzsche that created abiding tensions between Irish cultural production and reigning religious and nationalist orthodoxies, during an anxious period of Home Rule agitation, world war, revolution, civil war, and state building. With its wealth of detail, the book greatly enriches our understanding of modernist culture as a site of convergence between art and politics, indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives. -- .

Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx rests on the principles that storytelling is central to medical encounters between caregivers and patients and that narrative competence enhances medical competence. Thus, the book's goal is to develop the narrative competence of its reader. Grounded in the rhetorical theory of narrative that Phelan has been constructing over the course of his career, this volume utilizes a three-step method: Offering a jargon-free explication of core concepts of narrative such as character, progression, perspective, time, and space. Demonstrating how to use those concepts to interpret a diverse group of medical narratives, including two graphic memoirs. Pointing to the relevance of those demonstrations for caregiver-patient interactions. Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx is the ideal volume for undergraduate students interested in pursuing careers in healthcare, students in medical and allied health professional schools, and graduate students in the health humanities and social sciences.

Gold-guarding griffins, Cyclopes, killer lakes, man-eating birds, and "fire devils" from the sky-such wonders have long been dismissed as fictional. Now, thanks to the richly interdisciplinary field of geomythology, researchers are taking a second look. It turns out that these and similar tales, which originated in pre-literate societies, contain surprisingly accurate, pre-scientific intuitions about startling or catastrophic earth-based phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the unearthing of bizarre animal bones. Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events provides an accessible, engaging overview of this hybrid discipline. The introductory chapter surveys geomythology's remarkable history and its core concepts, while the second and third chapters analyze the geomythical resonances of universal earth tales about dragons and giants. Chapter 4 narrows the focus to regional stories and discusses the ways these and other myths have influenced legends about griffins, Cyclopes, and other iconic creatures. The final chapter considers future avenues of research in geomythology, including geohazard management, geomythology databases, geomythical "cold cases," and ways the discipline might eventually set, rather than merely support, research agendas in science. Thus, the book constitutes a valuable asset for scientists and lay readers alike, particularly in a time of growing interest in monsters, massive climate change, and natural disasters.

"Metre, Rhythm, Free Verse" is designed to explain the most important component of verse--its sound. This book provides all of the tools necessary to understanding poetry and poetry criticism, while clarifying and making accessible a number of technical terms which could otherwise be both intimidating and confusing.
In a manner which is both unpretentious and enthusiastic, Philip Hosbaum defines the difference between metre and rhythm, and provides newer and more precise definitions for terms such as blank verse, sprung verse and free verse. From the bob-wheel stanza to the iambus, from the Spenserian sonnet to modern rap, this comprehensive yet succinct volume covers the many terms and ideas which are essential to a fuller appreciation of poetry. In addition to providing this indispensable foundation for further reading, "Metre, Rhythm, Free Verse" also introduces its readers to a selection of key poets from all ages. Awelcome remedy to the complexity of poetical terminology, this book proves an invaluable introduction and an essential guide.

Section 1 of this volume describes three major debates about voice. They include:
* the overarching debate: discourse as text vs. discourse as voice;
* the traditional debate in rhetoric: ethos as real virtue in the real person vs. ethos as the appearance of virtue; and
* the modern debate: voice as self vs. voice as role.
These debates involve large, ideological questions about the nature of self or identity and about the relation of the text to the writer. They are all the more troublesome and unresolvable because they tend to be cast in binary, either/or terms.
Section 2 responds to these debates by showing that they don't need to be resolved in either/or terms. Looking carefully at the term "voice" shows that it has some fairly noncontroversial meanings when applied to writing. Thus, most of this section is devoted to an extended exploration of a family of five meanings for the term "voice" in writing -- audible voice or information, dramatic voice, recognizable or distinctive voice, voice with authority, and resonant voice or presence. These meanings make the concept of voice solid and usable apart from the theoretical debates.
The two theoretical debates only come up in relatively circumscribed arenas and so don't muddy most uses of the concept of voice in writing. In short, Elbow's hope is that he can make descriptive "claims" about the meanings of voice in writing about which people from various ideological camps will be able to agree.

This book introduces Asian American literary studies by engaging the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. Two rationales inform Ling's presentation of the field in this way: first is a felt need to provide recognizable contours and trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second is an imperative to historicize its practices - including polemics, controversies, and ideological ruptures - as an ongoing negotiation undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more adequate representation of the field's interests. These rationales are fully contextualized in the book's Introduction and Conclusion. The main body of this study is organized non-chronologically into 8 chapters, with each designed to reflect how the field has been energized by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual heterogeneity, its defining moments, and its cross-cutting relationship with the trends in other disciplines. What has emerged and been given prominence to in the surveys and discussions of this book then constitute the essential criticism of Asian American literary studies, a discourse almost 5 decades in the making when examined retrospectively.

Austen After 200 explores our contemporary relationship with Jane Austen in the wake of the bicentenaries of her death and the first publication of her novels. The volume begins by looking at Austen's popular appeal and at how she is consumed today in diverse cultural venues such the digisphere, blogosphere, festivals and book clubs. It then offers new approaches to the novels within various critical contexts, including adaptation studies, fan fiction, intertextuality, and more. Collecting these new essays in one volume enables a unique view of the crossovers and divergences in engagements with Austen in different settings, and will help a comparative approach between the popular and the academic to emerge more fully in Austen studies. The book gathers insights from a range of contributors invested in new reading spaces in order to show the creative ways in which we are all adapting as we continue to read Austen's works.

Overlap between psychoanalysis and the arts is a perennially hot topic * Uses literature to inform psychoanalytic theory and practice * Fresh take on understanding key psychoanalytic topic of unconscious processes