This volume critically analyses and theorises Asian interventions in the expanding phenomenon of Global Shakespeare. It interrogates Shakespeare's 'universality' from Asian perspectives: how this has been modified or even replaced by the 'global bard' as a recognisable brand, and how Asian Shakespeares have contributed to or subverted this process by both facilitating the worldwide dissemination of the bard's plays and challenging and resisting the very templates through which they become globally legible. Critically acclaimed Asian productions have prominently figured at premier Western festivals, and popular Asian appropriations like Bollywood, manga and anime have created new kinds of globally accessible Shakespeare. Essays in this collection engage with the emergent critical issues: the efficacy of definitions of the 'local', 'global', 'transnational' and 'cosmopolitan' and of the liminalities and mobilities in between. They further examine the politics of 'West' and 'East', the evolving markers of the 'Asian' and the equation of the 'glocal' with the 'Asian'; they attend to performance and archiving protocols and bring the current debates on translation, appropriation, and world literature to speak to the concerns of global and transnational Shakespeare. These investigations analyse recent innovative Asian theatre productions, popular cinematic and manga appropriations and the increasing presence of Shakespeare in the Asian digital sphere. They provide an Asian standpoint and lens in rereading the processes of cultural globalisation and the mobilisation of Shakespeare.

Rulers of Literary Playgrounds: Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children's Literature offers multifaceted reflection on interdependences between children and adults as they engage in play in literary texts and in real life. This volume brings together international children's literature scholars who each look at children's texts as key vehicles of intergenerational play reflecting ideologies of childhood and as objects with which children and adults interact physically, emotionally, and cognitively. Each chapter applies a distinct theoretical approach to selected children's texts, including individual and social play, constructive play, or play deprivation. This collection of essays constitutes a timely voice in the current discussion about the importance of children's play and adults' contribution to it vis-a-vis the increasing limitations of opportunities for children's playful time in contemporary societies.

In the early twentieth century the Modernist novel tested literary conventions and expectations, challenging representations of reality, consciousness and identity. These novels were not simply creative masterpieces, however, but also crucial articulations of revolutionary developments in critical thought.
Tracing the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Deborah Parsons considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers. Exploring the connections between their theories, Parsons pays particular attention to their work on:
- forms of realism
- characters and consciousness
- gender and the novel
- time and history.
An understanding of these three thinkers is fundamental to a grasp on modernism, making this an indispensable guide for students of modernist thought. It is also essential reading for those who wish to understand debates about the genre of the novel or the nature of literary expression, which were given a new impetus by the pioneering figures of Joyce, Richardson and Woolf.

This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not just be a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to - and thus make sense of - the individual bits of experience that we place into those structures. But of course at precisely this juncture a question arises: do we make that sense, or do we discover it? The twelve chapters brought together here lucidly and steadily reveal how the matters at hand are far more intricate and interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. This is a book that investigates the ways in which life and literature speak to each other.

Reading the Social in American Studies offers a unique exploration of the advantages and benefits in using sociological terms and concepts in American literary and cultural studies and, conversely, in using literature-understood broadly-to uncover a microlevel of the social. Its temporal scope ranges from the early 19th to the 21st century, providing a historical dimension that is otherwise often missing from studies on the conjunction of literature and sociology. The contributors' approaches include genre reflections as well as close readings, theoretical discussions of crucial sociological terms, and literary observations backed up by empirical sociological studies. The book will familiarize international readers with ideas on the social from both sides of the Atlantic, including scholarship of such figures as John Dewey, Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, and Pierre Bourdieu.

"The Risk of Reading" is a defense of the idea that deep and close readings of literature can help us to understand ourselves and the world around us. It explores some of the meaning and implications of modern life through the deep reading of significant books. Waxler argues that we need "fiction" to give our so-called "real life" meaning and that reading narrative fiction remains crucial to the making of a humane and democratic society.Beginning by exploring the implications of thinking about the importance of story in terms of "real life," "The Risk of Reading "focuses on the importance of human language, especially language shaped into narrative, and how that language is central to the human quest for identity. Waxler argues that we are "linguistic beings," and that reading literary narrative is a significant way to enrich and preserve the traditional sense of human identity and knowledge. This is especially true in the midst of a culture which too often celebrates visual images, spectacle, electronic devices, and celebrity. Reading narrative, in other words, should be considered a counter-cultural activity crucial on the quest to "know thyself." Reading literature is one of the best opportunities we have today to maintain a coherent human identity and remain self-reflective individuals in a world that seems particularly chaotic and confusing. Each chapter takes up a well-known work of nineteenth- or twentieth-century literature in order to discuss more fully these issues, exploring, in particular, the notion of life as a journey or quest and the crucial relationship between language and our contingent everyday existence. Of particular interest along the way is the question of what literary narrative can teach us about our mortality and how stories offer opportunities to reflect on the ambivalent and profound meaning of mortal knowledge.

This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by seriously considering the animal presence in texts. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied theoretically informed interdisciplinary perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cut across geographical and period boundaries and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the "animal turn" in the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers fresh perspectives on Posthumanist theory, inviting readers to revisit those criteria that created species' difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating, and highly relevant topics. Comprising over 15 chapters by a team of international contributors, this book is divided into four parts: Contestation over Species Hierarchy and CategorizationAnimal (Re)constructionsInterspecies RelationalitiesIntersectionality- Animal and Gender This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of Critical Animal Studies and Environmental Studies.

This volume is co-edited by the director of the Freiburg graduate school "Factual and Fictional Narration" (GRK 1767, Freiburg/Germany) and the director of the Aarhus Centre for Fictionality Studies (University of Aarhus, DK). The collection of essays re-examines the much discussed fact fiction distinction in light of the current burgeoning of research on fictionality. It provides a forum for ongoing work on fictionality from France, Germany and Denmark and Sweden. By placing discussions of the notion of fictionality in one volume, the editors hope to initiate exchange between the different traditions represented in the essays und to help the task of translating the available concepts and terminologies so they can travel between different models and theoretical frameworks.

This book is a critical study of the ancestors of contemporary poetry anthologies: the poetic miscellanies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that miscellanies are a distinctive kind of literary collection and that their popularity in the period 1680-1800 had a far-reaching impact on authors, publishers, and readers of poetry. This study expands the definition of miscellanies to include single-author collections called miscellanies as well as the multiple-author collections that have traditionally been the focus of scholarly attention. It shows how multiple-author miscellanies fostered different kinds of literary community and explores the neglected role of single-author miscellanies in the self-fashioning of eighteenth-century writers. Later chapters examine miscellanies' relationships with periodicals, their contribution to the formation of the literary canon, and their reception and transformation in the hands of readers. The book draws on newly available digital data as well as evidence from hundreds of printed miscellanies to shed new light on how poetry was written, published, and read in the long eighteenth century.

John Donne's Language of Disease reveals the influence of medical knowledge -- a rapidly changing field in early modern England -- on Donne's thinking and writing. This knowledge played a crucial role in shaping how Donne understood his everyday experiences, and how he conveyed those experiences in his work. Examining a wide range of his texts through the lens of medical history, this study contends that Donne was both a product of his period and a remarkable exception to it. He used medical language in unexpected and striking ways that made his ideas resonate with his original audience, and that can illuminate his ideas for readers today.

This book examines the representation of child sexual abuse in five American novels written from 1850 to the present. The historical range of the novels shows that child sexual abuse is not a new problem, although it has been called by other names in other eras. The introduction explains what literature and literary criticism bring to persistent questions that arise when children are sexually abused. Psychoanalytic concepts developed by Freud, Ferenczi, Kohut, and Lacan inform readings of the novels. Theories of trauma, shame, psychosis, and perversion provide insights into the characters represented in the stories. Each chapter is guided by a difficult question that has arisen from real-life situations of child sexual abuse. Legal and therapeutic interventions respond with their disciplinary resources to these questions as they concern victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. Literary criticism offers another analytic framework that can significantly inform those responses.

The portentous terms and phrases associated with the first decades of the Frankfurt School - exile, the dominance of capitalism, fascism - seem as salient today as they were in the early twentieth century. The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School addresses the many early concerns of critical theory and brings those concerns into direct engagement with our shared world today. In this volume, a distinguished group of international scholars from a variety of disciplines revisits the philosophical and political contributions of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and others. Throughout, the Companion's focus is on the major ideas that have made the Frankfurt School such a consequential and enduring movement. It offers a crucial resource for those who are trying to make sense of the global and cultural crisis that has now seized our contemporary world.

Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions is a contemporary study of all Jane Austen's writings focusing on her representation of women, sexuality, the material objects, and linguistic patterns by which this sexuality was expressed. Heydt-Stevenson demonstrates the subtle, vulgar, and humorous ways Austen uses human bodies, objects, and activities (fashion, jewelry, crafts, popular literature, travel and tourism, money, and courtship rituals) to convey sexuality and sexual appetites. Through the sexual subtext, Heydt-Stevenson proposes, Austen satirized contemporary sexual hypocrisy; overcame the stereotypes of women authors as sexually inhibited, sheltered, or repressed; and addressed as sophisticated and worldly an audience as Byron's. Thus through her careful reading of all the Austen texts in light of the language of eroticism, both traditional and contemporary, Heydt-Stevenson re-evaluates Austen's audience, the novels, and her role as a writer.

The Stuttering Son: A Literary Study of Boys and Their Fathers examines stuttering, a condition which overwhelmingly affects boys, in terms of the complex relationships a number of male authors have had with their fathers. Most of these writers, from Cotton Mather to John Updike, were themselves stutterers; for two others, Melville and Kafka, the focus shifts to how similar family tensions contributed to their interest in the related condition of anorexia. A final section looks at the patricidal impulse lurking behind much of this analysis, as evident in Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Nietzsche. By focusing on the issue of a boy's emotional development, this book attempts to re-establish the value of a broadly psychological approach to understanding stuttering.

This volume is a collection of a number of country folk tales. The tales reveal a good deal of fairy lore, some tree lore, including ghostly trees like crooker, the uncanny black dog makes his appearance in more than one tale and also include several long fireside tales.

In this book, Sarah Cash examines the intersection of music and temporality in British literature of the long nineteenth century. The sound spaces created at these intersections function as antimimetic resistance to hegemonic structures. Through its temporal multiplicity, music resonates in excess of linear time, revealing a metaphoric soundedness in the text that subverts reader expectation and reveals how seemingly realist nineteenth-century novels transgress the limitations of their classic narratological structures. In even the most apparently "realist" texts, the most extravagant, excessive, and hyperbolic elements exceed the bounds of what we often consider real, disrupting mimetic bias. Cash argues that music offers the most dynamic way to expose this vexed temporality in the text. Through scholarly intervention a disruption of historic classifications show that Victorians are heirs of Romanticism's musical ideals, including the power of music to penetrate and transform space and time and the permanence of sound as it reverberates beyond human perception. Scholars of nineteenth-century literature, temporality, and gender studies will find this book of particular interest.

This book presents a definition of literary postmodernism, using detective and science fictions as a frame. Through an exploration of both prior theoretical approaches, and indicators through characteristics of postmodernist fiction, this book identifies a structural framework to both understand and apply the lessons of postmodernism for the next generation. Within a growing consensus that the postmodern era has passed, this book examines the different conceptions of postmodernism and posits a meaningful definition, one which can provide the foundation for future literary expression. This theory is then applied to genre fiction, particularly detective fiction and science fiction, demonstrating that postmodernism is found in the structure, rather than questions posed about literary expression. Finally, Matthias Stephan considers post-postmodern movements, and how they can be expressed given this definition of literary postmodernism, moving forward to the twenty-first century.

1) This book presents a comprehensive account of the eminent Bengali writer and activist, the Ramon Magsaysay Awardee Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre in its full range and versatility. 2) It draws attention to Devi's role as a woman writer with a difference and her image outside Bengal. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian Literature and Cultural studies across UK.

Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing examines the ways in which memory furnishes important source material in the three distinct areas of critical theory, memoir, and memorial art. The book first shows how affect theorists have increasingly complemented more traditional archival research through the use of "academic memoir." This theoretical piece is then applied to memoir works by Caribbean writers Dionne Brand and Patrick Chamoiseau, and the final case study in the book interprets as memorial art Kara Walker's ephemeral 80,000 pound sugar sculpture of 2014. Memory as method; memory as archive; memorial as affect: this book looks at the interplay between archival sources on the one hand, and the affective memories, both personal and collective, that flow from, around, and into the constantly shifting record of the past.

Pathologizing Black Bodies reconsiders the black body as a site of cultural and corporeal interchange; one involving violence and oppression, leaving memory and trauma sedimented in cultural conventions, political arrangements, social institutions and, most significantly, materially and symbolically engraved upon the body, with "the self" often deprived of agency and sovereignty. Consisting of three sections, this text focuses on works of the 20th and 21st century fiction and cultural narratives by mainly African American authors, aiming to highlight the different ways in which race has been pathologized in America and examine how the legacies of plantation ideology have been metaphorically inscribed on black bodies. The variety of analytical approaches and thematic foci with respect to theories and discourses surrounding race and the body allow us to delve into this thorny territory in the hope of gaining perspectives about how African-American lives are still shaped and haunted by the legacies of plantation slavery. Furthermore, this volume offers insights into the politics of eugenic corporeality in an illustrative dialogue with the lasting carceral and agricultural effects of life on a plantation. Tracing the degradation and suppression of the black body, both individual and social, this text includes analysis of the pseudo-scientific discourse of social Darwinism and eugenics; the practice of mass incarceration and the excessive punishment of black bodies; and food apartheid and USDA practices of depriving black farmers of individual autonomy and collective agency. Based on such an interplay of discourses, methodologies and perspectives, this volume aims to use literature to further examine the problematic relationship between race and the body and stress that black lives do indeed matter in the USA.

This volume contains a collection of seminal articles and recent research which are important reading for anyone wanting to understand current theoretical developments within the field of language and literacy studies. The collection reflects a growing recognition over the past decade of the importance of social factors in language and literacy development. The focus has shifted from talking about skills and competences to investigating the relationships between language and literacy practices, personal identities and social and cultural processes. It provides an important resource of classic articles (some of which are not easily obtainable) and up-to-date research for teachers, students and researchers working in language studies, anthropology and education.

This book is the first comparative study of novels by Patrick Modiano, W. G. Sebald, and Antonio Munoz Molina. Drawing on many literary figures, movements, and traditions, from the Spanish Golden Age, to German Romanticism, to French philosophy, via Jewish modernist literature, Ian Ellison offers a fresh perspective on European fiction published around the turn of the millennium. Reflecting on what makes European fiction European, this book examines how certain novels understand themselves to be culturally and historically late, expressing a melancholy awareness of how the past and present are irreconcilable. Within this framework, however, it considers how backwards-facing, tradition-oriented self-consciousness, burdened by a sense of exhaustion in European culture and the violence of its past, may yet suggest the potential for re-enchantment in the face of obsolescence.

The Routledge Global Haiku Reader provides a historical overview and comprehensive examination of haiku across the world in numerous languages, poetic movements, and cultural contexts. Offering an extensive critical perspective, this volume provides leading essays by poets and scholars who explore haiku's various global developments, demonstrating the form's complex and sometimes contradictory manifestations from the twentieth century to the present. The sixteen chapters are carefully organized into categories that reflect the salient areas of practice and study: Haiku in Transit, Haiku and Social Consciousness, Haiku and Experimentation, The Future of Global Haiku. An insightful introduction surveys haiku's influence beyond Japan and frames the collection historically and culturally, questioning commonly held assumptions about haiku and laying the groundwork for new ways of seeing the form. Haiku's elusiveness, its resistance to definition, is partly what keeps it so relevant today, and this book traces the many ways in which this global verse form has evolved. The Routledge Global Haiku Reader ushers haiku into the twenty-first century in a critically minded and historically informed manner for a new generation of readers and writers and will appeal to students and researchers in literary studies, Asian studies, comparative literature, cultural studies and creative writing.

In this work, the author contends that we should create a comparative framework for the study of imaginary worlds in the social sciences. Making use of extended examples from both science fiction and fantasy fiction, as well as the living movement of steampunk, the reader is invited to an argument about how best to define imaginary worlds and approach them as social locations for qualitative research. It is suggested in this volume that increasing economic and existential forms of alienation fuel the contemporary surge of participation in imaginary worlds (from gaming worlds to young adult novels) and impel a search for more humane forms of social and cultural organization. Suggestions are made about the usefulness of imaginary worlds to social scientists as places for both testing out theoretical formulations and as tools for teaching in our classrooms.