Empowerment as a concept is making its impact on the field of literary studies. This volume shows its intricate relation to contemporary fiction in English with a broad range of approaches such as feminist, transcultural, and intersectional studies and dealing with genres as diverse as dystopia, science fiction, TV adaptations, the historical novel and immigrant fiction.

Die Afrikaanse literatuur het 'n aangrypende lewe in Afrika oopgeskryf. Hierdie lewe kry sy beslag in 'n boeiende takelwerk verse, in 'n kennis van die aand en deur die oe van 'n siener in die suburbs. Kannas kom huis toe en Poppies loop die lange swerfjare deur. Nie slegs die belletrie (die arbeid van skeppende skrywers) is indrukwekkend nie, maar ook die getuienis van kundige lesers - die leesaktiwiteite van akademici wat sin moet maak van skeppende arbeid, wat die patrone moet ople en die teoretiese lense instel op die gedig, die toneelstuk, die essay, die drama of roman. Akademies gesproke is Perspektief en profiel 'n onontbeerlike handleiding. Dit is tans die belangrikste beskouing van ons skryfwerk in Afrikaans en die begeleidende literere gesprek. Dit bied insig in die oeuvres van die belangrikste skrywers (die "profiel" in die boektitel), maar is ook 'n bestekopname van verskuiwende teoretiese gesigspunte en aksente en 'n kartering van die gebied, vandaar die "perspektief". Dit toon by implikasie oortuigend aan hoedat die Afrikaanse letterkunde aansluit in suid-suid-verband met ander literature van die halfrond, en ondersoek die historiese en tydgenootlike noord-suid-bande en -spanninge. Ook verken dit die skryftegnieke en die produksie en resepsie van die Afrikaanse teks in Afrika. Dis 'n boek wat sensitief is vir die polities-kulturele omgewing wat steeds omvorm word deur die momentum geskep deur die koms van demokrasie in 1994. Eerder as om 'n literatuurgeskiedenis te probeer wees wat die finale woord wil spreek en ondubbelsinnig kanoniseer, word die literatuur hier as strydperk aangebied. Hierdie veelstemmige gesprek matig sigself as literatuurgeskiedenis nie objektiwiteit aan nie, maar huldig verskeidenheid en teenspraak. Perspektief en profiel toon aan dat die Afrikaanse letterkunde diep geent is in die kontinent Afrika. Dit boekstaaf die geestesprestasie van mense aan die suidpunt van 'n uitdagende kontinent. Dit is mense wat rekenskap gee van hul ontheemding en twyfel, maar ook van inburgering en liefde vir die land, van verwantskap met landgenote wat ander geskiedenisse en huistale het. Dis 'n literatuur van hierwees en aanhanklikheid aan plant en dier, landskap en leemte. Perspektief en profiel verskyn tydens die groot wending. Dis 'n tyd waarin die Boek soos geslagte dit sedert Gutenberg geken het weens die oorgang na digitaliteit onder beleg kom. Die tydsbesteding aan ernstig lees as aktiwiteit verskraal en hierdie boek is 'n tydige herinnering aan die tydsaamheid en denke wat in 'n literatuur opgesluit is. Die boek verdien 'n staanplek in elke Afrikaanssprekende gesin se boekrak of leplek in hul e-boek-biblioteek. Dit is onontbeerlik vir die student en die akademikus. As jy wil weet hoe jou voorgeslagte hul hierwees verwoord het en hoe jou tydgenote jou eie situasie stem gee, is hierdie boek jou toevlug. Deel 2 - Verkorte inhoud: 'n Oorsig van die Afrikaanse drama en teater van 1990 tot 2010 'n Perspektief op die Afrikaanse drama van 1906 tot 1966 Die vroueskrywer in die Afrikaanse letterkunde 'n Perspektief op die Afrikaanse literere tydskrifte 'n Perspektief op kinder- en jeugliteratuur

Caribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to perimetric Critical Theory. The book argues that their singular project has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, was from the start indelibly marked by the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism. Chapters and sections address figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Baron de Vastey, Victor Schoelcher, Aime Cesaire, Rene Menil, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Conde, and Edouard Glissant, while an extensive theoretical introduction defines the essential parameters of 'Caribbean Critique.'

So this English professor comes into class and starts talking about the textual organization of jokes, the taxonomy of puns, the relations between the linguistic form and the content of humorous texts, and other past and current topics in language-based research into humor. At the end he stuffs all

This book explores the media ecologies of literature - the ways in which a literary text is interwoven in its material, technical, performative, praxeological, affective, and discursive network and which determine how it is experienced and interpreted. Through novel approaches to the complex, contingent and interdependent environments of literature, this volume demonstrates how questions about the mediality of literature - particularly in the wake of digitization - shed a new light on our understanding of textuality, reading, platforms and reception processes. By drawing on recent developments in advanced media theory, Media Ecologies of Literature emphasizes the productivity of innovative re-conceptualizations of literature as a medium in its own right. In an intentionally wide historical scope, the essays engage with literary texts from the Romantic to the contemporary period, from Charlotte Smith and Oscar Wilde to A. L. Kennedy and Mark Z. Danielewski, from the traditionally printed novel to audiobooks and reading apps.

The viscerally haunting and politically disturbing Painted Bird, the most famous novel by the Polish-American writer, Jerzy Kosinski, finally receives a long overdue fresh scientific perspective: a truly insightful study of linguistic and cultural controversy in translation against the benchmark of a tailor-made iron-clad methodology of such concepts as involved culture, detached culture and the universe of the opus. The study presents the kaleidoscopic cross section of renditions into as many as thirteen languages, making it a pioneering elaboration of a macrocosm of the afterlife of a translated novel and a tour de force of comparative translation studies. The dark contents of the work, heavily loaded with political and moral issues, vulnerable to shifts and refractions in the process of translation, have been analysed, unaffected by ideological sway, debunking any persistent myths about Kosinski's harrowing work.

The relationship between Conrad's Malay fiction and colonialism is a prominent subject of commentary now, and has been for some time. Most scholars would point to Chinua Achebe's important article "An Image of Africa" as the initiation into the interest in Conrad and colonialism, but if fact decades previously, Florence Clemens had begun this conversation in her ground-breaking commentary on Conrad's Malay fiction. At the time Florence Clemens was writing, almost nothing had been written on the Conrad's colonial world, and for many years her work thus was relatively unknown and relatively difficult to obtain. However, Clemens' work is significant, and its appearance in Brill's Conrad Studies series now makes this important study readily available to scholars.

What stands out about racism is its ability to withstand efforts to legislate or educate it away. In The Racist Fantasy, Todd McGowan argues that its persistence is due to a massive unconscious investment in a fundamental racist fantasy. As long as this fantasy continues to underlie contemporary society, McGowan claims, racism will remain with us, no matter how strenuously we struggle to eliminate it. The racist fantasy, a fantasy in which the racial other is a figure who blocks the enjoyment of the racist, is a shared social structure. No one individual invented it, and no one individual is responsible for its perpetuation. While no one is guilty for the emergence of the racist fantasy, people are nonetheless responsible for keeping it alive and thus responsible for fighting against it. The Racist Fantasy examines how this fantasy provides the psychic basis for the racism that appears so conspicuously throughout modern history. The racist fantasy informs everything from lynching and police shootings to Hollywood blockbusters and musical tastes. This fantasy takes root under capitalism as a way of explaining the failures and disappointments that result from the relationship to the commodity. The struggle against racism involves dislodging the fantasy structure and to change the capitalist relations that require it. This is the project of this book.

Examining the ways in which modernism is created within specific historical contexts, as well as how it redefines the concept of history itself, this book sheds new light on the historical-mindedness of modernism and the artistic avant-gardes. Cutting across Anglophone and less explored European traditions and featuring work from a variety of eminent scholars, it deals with issues as diverse as artistic medium, modernist print culture, autobiography as history writing, avant-garde experimentations and modernism's futurity. Contributors examine both literary and artistic modernism, combining theoretical overviews and archival research with case studies of Anglophone as well as European modernism, which speak to the current historicizing trend in modernist and literary studies.

Through readings of Ishiguro's repurposing of key elements of realism and modernism; his interest in childhood imagination and sketching; interrogation of aesthetics and ethics; his fascination with architecture and the absent home; and his expressionist use of 'imaginary' space and place, Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics examines the manner in which Ishiguro's fictions approach, but never quite reveal, the ineffable, inexpressible essence of his narrators' emotionally fraught worlds. Reformulating Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the 'essence of world can only be indicated' as 'the essence of world can only be gestured towards,' Sloane argues that while Ishiguro's novels and short stories are profoundly sensitive to the limitations of literary form, their narrators are, to varying degrees, equally keenly attuned to the failures of language itself. In order to communicate something of the emotional worlds of characters adrift in various uncertainties, while also commenting on the expressive possibilities of fiction and the mimetic arts more widely, Ishiguro appropriates a range of metaphors which enable both author and character to gesture towards the undisclosable essences of fiction and being.

The literary arts represent and provoke experiences of understanding and emotion, and this open access study examines how the practical pursuit of well-being in healthcare reveals purposes at the core of our engagements with and understanding of literature itself. During the past twenty years, much admirable work in the "health humanities" has focused upon what studies of literature contribute to the understandings and the practical work-the "worldly work"-of healthcare. Such a project aims at developing healthcare practitioners who bring greater care to those who come to them ailing or in fear or faced with terrible suffering. Literary Studies and Well-Being turns this inside out by examining the intergenerational caretaking of healthcare in a manner which allows us to comprehend the nature and discipline of literary studies in new ways. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Oklahoma.

Notes from the Crawl Room employs the lens and methods of horror writing to critique the excesses and absurdities of philosophy. Each story reveals disastrous and de-humanising effects of philosophies that are separated from real, lived experience (e.g. the absurdity of arguing over a sentence in Kant while the world burns around us). From a Kafkaesque exploration of administrative absurdities to the horrors of discursive violence, white supremacy and the living spectres of patriarchy, A.M. Moskovitz doesn't shy away from addressing the complex aspects of our lives. In addition to offering often humourous critiques of philosophy, these works are also, somewhat ironically, pieces of philosophy themselves. Each story seeks to move a subject area forward offering the reader the capacity to think through ideas in a weirder and more open way than traditional philosophy usually allows. An antidote to philosophy that seeks to close down and shut off the imaginative potential of human thought, Notes from the Crawl Room revels in the unsettling and creative potential of stories for revealing what thinking philosophically might really mean.

The Philosophy of Matter is a journey in thinking through the material fate of the earth itself; its surfaces and undercurrrents, ecologies, environments and irreparable cracks. With figures such as Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres as philosophical guides and writings on New Materialism, Posthumanism and Affect Theory as intellectual context, Rick Dolphijn proposes a radical rethinking of some of the basic themes of philosophy: subjectivity, materiality, body (both human and otherwise) and the act of living. This rethink is a work of imagination and meditation in order to conceive of "another earth for another people". It is a homage to courageous thinking that dares to question the religious, capitalist and humanist realities of the day. A poetic philosophy of how to live in troubling times when even the earth beneath us feels unstable, Dolphijn offers a way to think about the world with depth, honesty and glimpses of hope.

This literary analysis of the representation of 'Gypsies' in juvenile literature is unique in its comparative scope, as well as in the special attention to rare pre-1850 narratives, the period in which juvenile literature developed as a specific genre. Most studies on the subject are about one national literary tradition or confined to a limited period. In this study Dutch, English, French and German texts are analysed and discussed with reference to main academic publications on the subject. Emphasis is on the rich variation in narrative presentations, rather than on an inventory of images or prejudices. An important topic is the fundamental difference between early English and German narratives. Important because of the wide dissemination of German stories.

Thomas Pynchon's style has dazzled and bewildered readers and critics since the 1960s, and this book employs computational methods from the digital humanities to reveal heretofore unknown stylistic trends over the course of Pynchon's career, as well as challenge critical assumptions regarding foregrounded and supposedly "Pynchonesque" stylistic features: ambiguity/vagueness, acronyms, ellipsis marks, profanity, and archaic stylistics in Mason & Dixon. As the first book-length stylistic or computational stylistic examination of Pynchon's oeuvre, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities provides a groundwork of stylistic experiments and interpretations, with over 60 graphs and tables, presented in a manner in which both technical and non-technical audiences may follow.

The German poet and mystic Novalis once identified philosophy as a form of homesickness. More than two centuries later, as modernity's displacements continue to intensify, we feel Novalis's homesickness more than ever. Yet nowhere has a longing for home flourished more than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in eco-phenomenology. If only we can reestablish our sense of material enmeshment in nature, so the logic goes, we might reverse the degradation we humans have wrought-and in saving the earth we can once again dwell in the nearness of our own being. Unsettling Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives of settler colonial homemaking. Taylor Eggan demonstrates that the Heideggerian strain of eco-phenomenology-along with its well-trod categories of home, dwelling, and world-produces uncanny effects in settler colonial contexts. He reads instances of nature's defamiliarization not merely as psychological phenomena but also as symptoms of the repressed consciousness of coloniality. The book at once critiques Heidegger's phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. Suggesting that alienation may in fact be "natural" to the human condition and hence something worth embracing instead of repressing, Unsettling Nature concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into "exo-phenomenology"-an experiential mode that engages deeply with the alterity of others and with the self as its own Other.

In Conscious Theatre Practice: Yoga, Meditation, and Performance, Lou Prendergast charts a theatre research project in which the notion of Self-realisation and related contemplative practices, including Bikram Yoga and Vipassana meditation, are applied to performance. Coining the term 'Conscious Theatre Practice', Prendergast presents the scripts of three publicly presented theatrical performances, examined under the 'three C's' research model: Conscious Craft (writing, directing, performance; Conscious Casting; Conscious Collaborations. The findings of this autobiographical project fed into a working manifesto for socially engaged theatre company, Black Star Projects. Along the way, the research engages with methodological frameworks that include practice-as-research, autoethnography, phenomenology and psychophysical processes, as well immersive yoga and meditation practice; while race, class and gender inequalities underpin the themes of the productions.

Featured on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading List For over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of scifi to utopian studies, formalist and leftist critical theory, and his broader engagement with what he terms "political epistemology." Disputing the Deluge joins a rapidly growing renewal of critical interest in Suvin's work on scifi and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 24 of Suvin's most significant interventions in the field from the 21st century, with an Introduction by editor Hugh O'Connell and a new preface by the author. Beginning with writings from the early 2000s that investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here--each a brilliant example of engaged thought--highlight the value of scifi for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin's interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008 economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the decline of democracy. By bringing together Suvin's essays all in one place, this collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.

Challenging existing methodological conceptions of the analytic approach to aesthetics, Jukka Mikkonen brings together philosophy, literary studies and cognitive psychology to offer a new theory on the cognitive value of reading fiction. Philosophy, Literature and Understanding defends the epistemic significance of narratives, arguing that it should be explained in terms of understanding rather than knowledge. Mikkonen formulates understanding as a cognitive process, which he connects to narrative imagining in order to assert that narrative is a central tool for communicating understanding. Demonstrating the effects that literary works have on their readers, he examines academic critical analysis, responses of the reading public and nonfictional writings that include autobiographical testimony to their writer's influences and attitudes to life. In doing so, he provides empirical evidence of the cognitive benefits of literature and of how readers demonstrate the growth of their understanding. By drawing on the written testimony of the reader, this book is an important intervention into debates on the value of literature that incorporates understanding in new and imaginative ways.

Introducing readers to a new theory of 'responsible reading', this book presents a range of perspectives on the contemporary relationship between modernism and theory. Emerging from a collaborative process of comment and response, it promotes conversation among disparate views under a shared commitment to responsible reading practices. An international range of contributors question the interplay between modernism and theory today and provide new ways of understanding the relationship between the two, and the links to emerging concerns such as the Anthropocene, decolonization, the post-human, and eco-theory. Promoting responsible reading as a practice that reads generously and engages constructively, even where disagreement is inevitable, this book articulates a mode of ethical reading that is fundamental to ongoing debates about strength and weakness, paranoia and reparation, and critique and affect.

In the final decade of the eighteenth century, theatre was amongst the most important sites for redefining France's national identity. In this study, Annelle Curulla uses a range of archival material to show that, more than any other subject matter which was once forbidden from the French stage, Roman Catholic religious life provided a crucial trope for expressing theatre's patriotic mission after 1789. Even as old rules and customs fell with the walls of the Bastille, dramatic works by Gouges, Chenier, La Harpe, and others depicted the cloister as a space for reimagining forms of familial, individual, and civic belonging and exclusion. By relating the dramatic trope of religious life to shifting concepts of gender, family, religiosity, and nation, Curulla sheds light on how the process of secularization played out in the cultural space of French theatre.