1) This book offers a comprehensive understanding of Amrita Pritam's work. 2) It includes representative selections from her creative writings; her life and times in English translations; her nonfictional writings and also demonstrate her editing acumen as editor for over thirty years. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian Literature and Cultural studies across UK.

How do we today define literary studies as an academic discipline and literature as a relevant, discrete object of study? Beyond arguments that insist upon the continued importance of literature via the broad category of culture on the one hand and nostalgic, traditionalist oppositions to materialist study of literature aimed to safeguard the autonomy of literature from the social, the economic, and the political on the other, Literary Materialisms gathers thirteen essays by established and emerging scholars that trace the medially and disciplinarily specific future of literary studies in an updated and newly historicized attention to materialism.

Francis Fukuyama’s controversial 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man demonstrates an important aspect of creative thinking: the ability to generate hypotheses and create novel explanations for evidence.

In the case of Fukuyama’s work, the central hypothesis and explanation he put forward were not, in fact, new, but they were novel in the academic and historical context of the time. Fukuyama’s central argument was that the end of the Cold War was a symptom of, and a vital waypoint in, a teleological progression of history.

Interpreting history as “teleological” is to say that it is headed towards a final state, or end point: a state in which matters will reach an equilibrium in which things are as good as they can get. For Fukuyama, this would mean the end of “mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. This grand theory, which sought to explain the end of the Cold War through a single overarching hypothesis, made the novel step of resurrecting the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of history – which had long been ignored by practical historians and political philosophers – and applying it to current events.

an endeavor to contribute to the burgeoning field of comparative literature, this book explores the understudied "intertextual dialogism" between American literature and Iranian cinema, providing an intertextual link between the two seemingly separate departments of literature and cinema. Foregrounding "the textuality of history, and the historicity of texts", this book contends that literary "texts" are synchronic artifacts prone to myriad intertextual and extra-textual readings and understandings, each historically conditioned. This book pinpoints how Iranian cinema appropriates and recontextualizes instances of modern American literature to construct and inculcate vestiges of national/gender identity on the silver screen. Watching Herzog, Franny and Zooey, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Death of a Salesman in Iran adds a new intertextual level to their dialogic textuality.

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.

An Introduction to Poetic Forms offers specimen discussions of poems through the lens of form. While each of its chapters does provide a standard definition of the form in question in its opening paragraphs, their main objective is to provide readings of specific examples to illustrate how individual poets have deviated from or subverted those expectations usually associated with the form under discussion. While providing the most vital information on the most widely taught forms of poetry, then, this collection will very quickly demonstrate that counting syllables and naming rhyme schemes is not the be-all and end-all of poetic form. Instead, each chapter will contain cross-references to other literary forms and periods as well as make clear the importance of the respective form to the culture at large: be it the democratising communicative power of the ballad or the objectifying male gaze of the blazon and resistance to same in the contreblazon - the efficacy of form is explored in the fullness of its cultural dimensions. In using standard definitions only as a starting point and instead focusing on lively debates around the cultural impact of poetic form, the textbook helps students and instructors to see poetic forms not as a static and lifeless affair but as living, breathing testament to the ongoing evolution of cultural debates. In the final analysis, the book is interested in showing the complexities and contradictions inherent in the very nature of literary form itself: how each concrete example deviates from the standard template while at the same time employing it as a foil to generate meaning.

A comprehensive collection which contains eight original chapters from a team of leading international interpretive philosophers. Freshly engages with the methodology of hermeneutics by applying the framework to contemporary sociopolitical topics. An outstanding reference source for researchers working in critical social science, social philosophy, ethical theory, environmental philosophy, philosophy of work, philosophy of testimony, philosophy of measurement, and philosophical hermeneutics itself.

This book critically explores the role of state schooling in the reproduction of social class inequalities in the UK. By uniquely combining critical ethnographic methods with participatory and visual research, it foregrounds the experiences and recollections of working class adults in relation to their past schooling. Drawing upon her own lived experiences, Jones theorises the experiences of her participants using an analysis of Marxist, Bourdieusian and Freirean frameworks to uncover relations of power and illustrate how schooling has reduced individual agency and sustained lived inequalities. By creating space for a Visual Intervention within Critical Ethnography (VICE) alongside her analysis of class and society, Jones successfully illuminates that working class struggles are not permanent, and that agency can be activated. The book also addresses an important need by centring research from the lived educational experiences of the working class, and, in particular, working class adults. Making a unique theoretical and methodological contribution using an innovative combined methodology approach, the text ultimately highlights the potential of empowering disadvantaged individuals by raising critical consciousness. Though it is focused on the experiences of adults, this book has important understandings for all sectors of education and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in the sociology of education, research methods in education, social inequality, social class and education politics.

Seamus Heaney's American Odyssey describes, with a new archive of correspondence, interviews, and working drafts, the some 40 years that Seamus Heaney spent in the United States as a teacher, lecturer, friend, and colleague, and as an active poet on the reading circuit. It is anchored by Heaney's appointments at Berkeley and Harvard, but it also follows Heaney's readings "on the road" at three important points in his career. It argues that Heaney was initially receptive to American poetry and culture while his career was still plastic, but as he developed more assurance and fame, he became much more critical of America as a superpower, especially in the military reaction to 9/11. This study emphasizes "the heard Heaney" as much as the "writerly Heaney" by listening in on key poetry readings at different times and to recorded but unpublished lectures on American and British poets at Harvard. It includes accounts by his creative writing students, aspiring poets, who testify to his mentoring as well as modeling for them how one can be "a poet in the world" as he was most strikingly.

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 volume: * the cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory. * connects Western Trauma Theory and South Asian Literature * will be of interest to scholars and researchers of literature, history, politics and South Asian studies

This volume is a collection of ten essays that direct their gaze to the unfolding of contagions in the non-classical contexts of Asia and Africa. Or, to borrow from the title of one of Partha Chatterjee's books, they are reflections on the pandemic in most of the world. Featuring many scholars (of the humanities and social sciences) in the Global South, these chapters take as their intellectual focus the political-social as well as the ethical challenges posed by the contagions in the "East." Through analyses of literary narratives/films/video games, this Contagion Narratives traces the manufactured narratives of victimization by majority-communities and the lethal divides consequently being drawn between a reconstituted "authentic majority" and the more vulnerable minority 'other' in these societies. The essays in this collection are animated by imaginations of liveable alternatives on a planet on the brink. This volume traces lineages to Buchi Emecheta and Rabindranath Tagore rather than Albert Camus, to Satyajit Ray and the indie traditions rather than Hollywood, and to Buddhism rather than Christianity, to track the historic journeys of "modernity." Using an eclectic set of analytical tools and strategies of textual criticism, this volume argues that ideas of "democracy," even while they carry echoes of other societies, are markedly different as they travel from Gaddafi's Libya to Wuhan under lockdown to colonial Bengal.

Proposing an elaborate interdisciplinary approach to literary reading of any provenance based on "experimental cosmopolitanism," that is de- and recontextualizing the texts from the points of view of multiple cultural formations and historical moments, this book will help innovative teachers and students to rediscover dialogically and creatively the potential of literature as a life experiment. Comparative, Postcolonial and World Literature programs as well as programs in Cultural Anthropology will find abundant food for seminar discussion and essay topics in the wide range of theories and philosophies covered by the book and its extensive and up to date bibliography. Supported by a thorough critique of local and overarching theories, this novel method will profit from the singularity of each professional or apprentice reader without giving in to cultural essentialism or relativism. Learning to recognize the fundamental plurilingualism of the literary experience through translations and versions of literary texts is enlightening at all levels of a humanist literary education. Theory, here, is not an abstract and rigid superimposition but the dynamic condition of emergence of unforeseen meanings.

This book engages with the writings of W.G. Sebald, mediated by perspectives drawn from curriculum and architecture, to explore the theme of unsettling complacency and confront difficult knowledge around trauma, discrimination and destruction. Moving beyond overly instrumentalist and reductive approaches, the authors combine disciplines in a scholarly fashion to encourage readers to stretch their understandings of currere. The chapters exemplify important, timely and complicated conversations centred on ethical response and responsibility, in order to imagine a more just and aesthetically experienced world. In the analysis of BILDUNG as human formation, the book illuminates the pertinent lessons to be learned from the works of Sebald and provokes further investigations into the questions of memory, grief, and limits of language. Through its juxtaposition of curriculum and architecture, and using the prose of Sebald as a prism, the book revitalizes questions about education and ethics, probes the unsettling of complacency, and enables conversation around difficult knowledge and ethical responsibility, as well as offering hope and resolve. An important intervention in standard approaches to understanding currere, this book provides essential context for scholars and educators with interests in the history of education, curriculum architectural education and practice studies, memory studies, narrative research, Sebaldian studies, and educational philosophy.

Elizabeth Gaskell's writings abound in references to a cultural materiality encompassing different types of fabric, stuffs, calicoes, chintzes and fine-point lace. These are not merely the motifs of the Realist genre but reveal a complex polysemy. Utilizing a metonymic examination of these tropes, this volume exposes the dramatic structural and socio-economic upheaval generated by industrialization, urbanization and the widening sphere of empire. The material evidence testifies to the technological and production innovations evolving diachronically for the period, and the evolution of Manchester as the industrial 'Cottonpolis' that clothed the world by the 1840s. This volume analyses Gaskell's manipulation of the materiality, arguing its firm roots lie in the quotidian of women's domestic and provincial life within the growing ranks of the middle classes. Exploring Gaskell's tactile imagination, an embodied relationship with fabrics and sewing, a function of her daily life from an early age, this volume provides insight into the sensory aspects of cloth and its ability to stir affective responses, emotions and memories, whereby worn fabrics and even the absence of previous textile treasures, is poignant, recreating layers of recollection. This book aims to restore the pulsating, dynamic context of ordinary women's dressed lives and presents innovative interpretations of Gaskell's texts.

Tombs in Shakespearean Drama explores the rhetorical deployment of tombs and monuments on the early modern stage, demonstrating their historiographic power and mythmaking potential. By analyzing references to tombs in plays by Shakespeare and others in conjunction with extant monuments, this volume demonstrates how these references function in two overlapping ways in period drama: monuments act as repositories of information about the past, and they allow the living to construct and preserve fictive narratives. The stage exposes the flimsy materiality of paper, placing less value on the written word than period poetry. In this way, critics have perhaps oversold as universal Shakespeare's poetic praise of stone. Tombs within plays act as a powerful historical and narrative medium, raising the stakes to provide the stage with the illusion of permanency. Playwrights use tombs to anchor the stage action, giving a sense of lasting importance to dramatic events and combatting the ephemeral nature of the playhouse. In drama, Shakespeare and others drew on the persona preserved on tombs; this volume widens our view of how these representations interacted in the commemorative economy of early modern England. Within the playhouse, it was the tomb, not the tome, that stood as a symbol of permanence.

The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human demonstrates the foundational but occluded role of the insectile in subject formation, tracking entomological events-such as buzzing, hatching, moulting, etc.-across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film. The book analyses a phenomenon called entomological fascination, which it defines as the constellation between subjectivity, fascination and the insectile, and is driven by the central dynamic between form and formlessness: entomological fascination comprehends both a resistance to and a fantasy of total form. The investigation turns to Lacanian psychoanalysis-fascination and the insectile are key to Lacan's work-to argue its case, whose ultimate intent is to undertake a broader deconstruction of the so-called human by insisting on its implications in the insectile. Lacan is usually eschewed in posthumanities debates, thereby missing an important resource: the Lacanian archive can be opened up to follow the dimensions of the posthuman in its insectile 'forms'.

This book advances an understanding of artworks as temporal experiments that explore different ways of thinking, experiencing, and living time. Temporal Experiments brings together aesthetics and time in innovative ways. The book's seven chapters offer a critical investigation of seven tactile figures in which time is embodied: event, habit, idleness, kairos, rhythm, ritual, and transit. The book connects the specific temporal strategies of individual artworks to pressing questions regarding temporality and timing in contemporary society. Temporal Experiments offers an interdisciplinary approach to temporality and engages with various artistic mediums: modern novels, contemporary cinema, dub reggae, tomb statuary, and early modern and modern poetry.

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.

First published in 1973 Critics on George Eliot brings together a selection of the best critical essays and discussions on the novels of George Eliot, including many that are not easily available outside well established and comprehensive libraries. The selection covers the whole range of George Eliot's work, and by setting different critical points of view side by side helps the student to find a position of her own. The intention is not to limit the student's critical reading to one small volume, but to stimulate to explore the critics more widely for herself and to read the novels again with greater understanding, and pleasure. This is a must read for students of English literature.

- 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.

In the mid-1990s, Ireland was experiencing the "best of times". The Celtic Tiger seemed to instil in the national consciousness that poverty was a problem of the past. The impressive economic performance ensured that the Republic occupied one of the top positions among the world's economic powers. During the boom, dissident voices continuously criticised what they considered to be a mirage, identifying the precariousness of its structures and foretelling its eventual crash. The 2008 recession proved them right. Throughout this time, the Irish contemporary short story expressed distrust. Enabled by its capacity to reflect change with immediacy and dexterity, the short story saw through the smokescreen created by the Celtic Tiger discourse of well-being. It reinterpreted and captured the worst and the best of the country and became a bridge connecting tradition and modernity. The major objective of this book is to analyse the interactions between fiction and reality during this period in Ireland by studying the short stories written by old and emergent voices published between the birth of the Celtic Tiger in 1995 up to its immediate aftermath in 2013.

The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human demonstrates the foundational but occluded role of the insectile in subject formation, tracking entomological events-such as buzzing, hatching, moulting, etc.-across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film. The book analyses a phenomenon called entomological fascination, which it defines as the constellation between subjectivity, fascination and the insectile, and is driven by the central dynamic between form and formlessness: entomological fascination comprehends both a resistance to and a fantasy of total form. The investigation turns to Lacanian psychoanalysis-fascination and the insectile are key to Lacan's work-to argue its case, whose ultimate intent is to undertake a broader deconstruction of the so-called human by insisting on its implications in the insectile. Lacan is usually eschewed in posthumanities debates, thereby missing an important resource: the Lacanian archive can be opened up to follow the dimensions of the posthuman in its insectile 'forms'.

A systematic theoretical account of dual narrative dynamics previously neglected In contrast with other books that are concerned with how readers respond to the text, this book is concerned with how readers (are invited to) respond differently to contrastive or incompatible parallel narrative movements in the same text. Brings to light the many ways that authors have used dual dynamics to increase the power of their narratives

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.