Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing accuracy and legibility of cartographic projections, the proliferation of empirically based chorographies, and the popular vogue for travel narratives served to order, package, and commodify space in a manner that was critical to the formation of a unified Britain. In tandem with such developments, however, a trenchant anti-cartographic skepticism also emerged. This critique of the map can be seen in many literary works of the period that satirize the efficacy and value of maps and highlight their ideological purposes. Against the Map argues that our understanding of the production of national space during this time must also account for these sites of resistance and opposition to hegemonic forms of geographical representation, such as the map. This study utilizes the methodologies of critical geography, as well as literary criticism and theory, to detail the conflicted and often adversarial relationship between cartographic and literary representations of the nation and its geography. While examining atlases, almanacs, itineraries, and other materials, Adam Sills focuses particularly on the construction of heterotopias in the works of John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Jane Austen. These "other" spaces, such as neighborhood, home, and country, are not reducible to the map but have played an equally important role in the shaping of British national identity. Ultimately, Against the Map suggests that nation is forged not only in concert with the map but, just as important, against it.

Winner of the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Play "Life of Pi will make you believe in the power of theatre" (Times). After a cargo ship sinks in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, there are five survivors stranded on a lifeboat - a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, a Royal Bengal tiger, and a sixteen year-old boy named Pi. Time is against them, nature is harsh, who will survive? Based on one of the most extraordinary and best-loved works of fiction - winner of the Man Booker Prize, selling over fifteen million copies worldwide - and featuring breath-taking puppetry and state-of-the-art visuals, Life of Pi is a universally acclaimed, smash hit adaptation of an epic journey of endurance and hope. Adapted by acclaimed playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, this edition was published to coincide with the West End premiere in November 2021.

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.

Infamous for authoring two concepts since favored by government powers seeking license for ruthlessness-the utilitarian notion of privileging the greatest happiness for the most people and the panopticon-Jeremy Bentham is not commonly associated with political emancipation. But perhaps he should be. In his private manuscripts, Bentham agonized over the injustice of laws prohibiting sexual nonconformity, questioning state policy that would put someone to death merely for enjoying an uncommon pleasure. He identified sources of hatred for sexual nonconformists in philosophy, law, religion, and literature, arguing that his goal of "the greatest happiness" would be impossible as long as authorities dictate whose pleasures can be tolerated and whose must be forbidden. Ultimately, Bentham came to believe that authorities worked to maximize the suffering of women, colonized and enslaved persons, and sexual nonconformists in order to demoralize disenfranchised people and prevent any challenge to power. In Uncommon Sense, Carrie Shanafelt reads Bentham's sexual nonconformity papers as an argument for the toleration of aesthetic difference as the foundation for egalitarian liberty, shedding new light on eighteenth-century aesthetics and politics. At odds with the common image of Bentham as a dehumanizing calculator or an eccentric projector, this innovative study shows Bentham at his most intimate, outraged by injustice and desperate for the end of sanctioned, discriminatory violence.

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.

Rewatching on the Point of the Cinematic Index offers a reassessment of the cinematic index as it sits at the intersection of film studies, trauma studies, and adaptation studies. Author Allen H. Redmon argues that far too often scholars imagine the cinematic index to be nothing more than an acknowledgment that the lens-based camera captures and brings to the screen a reality that existed before the camera. When cinema's indexicality is so narrowly defined, the entire nature of film is called into question the moment film no longer relies on a lens-based camera. The presence of digital technologies seemingly strips cinema of its indexical standing. This volume pushes for a broader understanding of the cinematic index by returning to the early discussions of the index in film studies and the more recent discussions of the index in other digital arts. Bolstered by the insights these discussions can offer, the volume looks to replace what might be best deemed a diminished concept of the cinematic index with a series of more complex cinematic indices, the impoverished index, the indefinite index, the intertextual index, and the imaginative index. The central argument of this book is that these more complex indices encourage spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation of the reality they see on the screen, and that it is on the point of these indices that the most significant instances of rewatching movies occur. Examining such films as John Lee Hancock's Saving Mr. Banks (2013); Richard Linklater's oeuvre; Paul Greengrass's United 93 (2006); Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006); Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011); and Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), Inception (2010), and Memento (2000), Redmon demonstrates that the cinematic index invites spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation.

Teenager Alan, fought over by a religious mother and an atheist father, finds release in horses, until he is driven to blind them with a spike. Why? While treating the boy, a psychiatrist discovers his own life is paradoxically in the witness box.

Part of the Heinemenn Advanced Shakespeare series of plays for A Level students, this version of Hamlet includes notes which should bridge the gap between GCSE and A Level, and space for students' own annotation. The text includes activities and assignments after each act.

In 1682 the French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle claimed the Mississippi River basin for France, naming the region Louisiana to honor his king, Louis XIV. Until the United States acquired the territory in the Louisiana Purchase more than a century later, there had never been a revolution, per se, in Louisiana. However, as Jennifer Tsien highlights in this groundbreaking work, revolutionary sentiment clearly surfaced in the literature and discourse both in the Louisiana colony and in France with dramatic and far-reaching consequences. In Rumors of Revolution, Tsien analyzes documented observations made in Paris and in New Orleans about the exercise of royal power over French subjects and colonial Louisiana stories that laid bare the arbitrary powers and abuses that the government could exert on its people against their will. Ultimately, Tsien establishes an implicit connection between histories of settler colonialism in the Americas and the fate of absolutism in Europe that has been largely overlooked in scholarship to date.

Napoleon's biographers often note his fondness for theatre, but as we approach the bicentenary of the Emperor's death, little remains known about the nature of theatre at the time. This is particularly the case for tragedy, the genre in which France considered itself to surpass its neighbours. Based on extensive archival research, this first sustained study of tragedy under Napoleon examines how a variety of agents used tragedy and its rewriting of history to make an impact on French politics, culture and society, and to help reconstruct the French nation after the Revolution. This volume covers not just Napoleon's efforts, but also those of other individuals in government, the theatrical world, and the wider population. Similarly, it uncovers a public demand for tragedy, be it the return of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire to the Comedie-Francaise, or new hits like Les Templiers (1805) and Hector (1809). This research also sheds new light on Napoleonic propaganda and censorship, exposing their incoherencies and illustrating how audiences reacted to these processes. In short, Tragedy and Nation in the Age of Napoleon argues that Napoleonic tragedy was not simply tired and derivative; it engaged its audiences, by chomping at the poetic bit, allowing for a retrial of the Revolution, and offering a vision of the new French nation.

Taking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, John Keats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders in literature. Lennartz examines the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite - closure, containment and stoniness - and explores literary history as a meandering narrative in which 'female' porosity and 'manly' stoniness clash, showing how different societies and epochs respond to and engage with bodily porosity. This book considers the ways that this relationship is constantly renegotiated and where effusive and 'feminine' genres, such as 'sloppy' letters and streams of consciousness, are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity, like epitaphs, sonnets and the Bildungsroman.

From Allen Ginsberg's 'angel-headed hipsters' to angelic outlaws in Essex Hemphill's Conditions, angelic imagery is pervasive in queer American art and culture. This book examines how the period after 1945 expanded a unique mixture of sacred and profane angelic imagery in American literature and culture to fashion queer characters, primarily gay men, as embodiments of 'bad beatitudes'. Deutsch explores how authors across diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, including John Rechy, Richard Bruce Nugent, Allen Ginsberg, and Rabih Alameddine, sought to find the sacred in the profane and the profane in the sacred. Exploring how these writers used the trope of angelic outlaws to celebrate men who rebelled wilfully and nobly against religious, medical, legal and social repression in American society, this book sheds new light on dissent and queer identities in postmodern American literature.

The noted British literary scholar turns her attention to the rarely examined topic of narrative in the plays and offers some new insight into the playwright's craft. Shakespeare makes narrative theatrical and it is as prominent in his craft and language as characterization and imagery. Hardy analyzes key structures, including reflexive narrative and the narrative compoundings used to begin and end plays. She also examines narrative subtleties in the works of Plutarch, Holinshed, Brooke, and Sidney that Shakespeare read. Finally, she explores common narrative techniques -- memory, forecast, and gendered story -- and extensively analyzes these issues in three plays: Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth.