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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism
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.
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Life of Pi
(Paperback)
Lolita Chakrabarti; Yann Martel
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R361
Discovery Miles 3 610
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Ships in 12 - 19 working days
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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.
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