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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism
Literature in a Time of Migration offers a profound rethinking of
British fiction in light of the new practices of human mobility
that reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Building on the growing
critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, it
confronts the paradox that at a time when transnational human
movement occurred globally on an unprecedented scale, British
fiction appeared to turn inward to tell stories of local places
that valorized stability and rootedness. In contrast, this book
reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to
the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a
culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print
commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and
communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the
conditions and consequences of human movement. Examining works by
Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and George Eliot, as well as
popular contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, and Thomas
Martin Wheeler, this volume demonstrates how literary texts overlap
with an agenda set in public discussions of colonial emigration
that they also helped to shape. Debates about assisted emigration,
'forced' and 'free' migration, colonization, settlement, and the
removal of native peoples, figure in fictions in complex ways. Read
alongside writings by emigration theorists, practitioners, and
enthusiasts for colonization, fictional texts reveal a powerful and
sustained engagement with British migratory practices and their
worldwide consequences. Literature in a Time of Migration is a
timely reminder of the place and importance of migration within
British cultural heritage.
With an introduction by Harriet McDougal, Origins of The Wheel of Time by Michael Livingston explores the inspirations behind the acclaimed series The Wheel of Time, including a biography of Robert Jordan for the first time.
Explore never-before-seen insights into The Wheel of Time, including a brand-new, redrawn world map by Ellisa Mitchell using change requests discovered in Robert Jordan's unpublished notes and an alternate scene from an early draft of The Eye of the World.
This companion to the internationally bestselling series will delve into the creation of Robert Jordan's masterpiece, drawing from interviews and an unprecedented examination of his unpublished notes. Michael Livingston tells the behind-the-scenes story of who Jordan was (including a chapter that is the very first published biography of the author), how he worked, and why he holds such an important place in modern literature.
The second part of the book is a glossary to the 'real world' in The Wheel of Time. King Arthur is in The Wheel of Time. Merlin, too. But so is Alexander the Great and the Apollo Space Program, the Norse gods and Napoleon's greatest defeat - and so much more.
In late 1872, the New York Herald named James J. O'Kelly its
special correspondent to Cuba, to cover what would later be known
as the Ten Years' War. O'Kelly was tasked with crossing Spanish
lines, locating the insurgent camps, and interviewing the president
of the Cuban republic, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes. O'Kelly became a
political lightning rod when, after fulfilling his mission, he was
arrested, court-martialed, and threatened with execution in Spanish
Cuba. For the book that followed, The Mambi-Land, or Adventures of
a Herald Correspondent in Cuba, O'Kelly assembled edited versions
of the eighteen dispatches he sent to the Herald, some written in
the remotest imaginable places in the Cuban interior. The
Mambi-Land constitutes the first book-length account of Cuba's Ten
Years' War for independence from Spain (1868-1878) and provides a
window on an understudied moment in U.S.-Cuba relations. More than
recovering an important lost work, this critical edition draws
attention to Cuba's crucial place in American national
consciousness in the post-Civil War period and represents a timely
and significant contribution to our understanding of the
complicated history of Cuba-U.S. relations.
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.
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.
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.
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