First published in 1971, this work examines the tradition of the epic and the many forms in which it has presented itself over time. After unpicking the defining aspects of an epic, the book tracks the literary tradition from the classical period through to modern day. Exploring major texts such as Beowulf, Odyssey, Divina Comedia, The Faerie Queene and Ulysses, this work will be a valuable resource for those studying the epic and English literature.

First published in 1971, this work examines the tradition of the epic and the many forms in which it has presented itself over time. After unpicking the defining aspects of an epic, the book tracks the literary tradition from the classical period through to modern day. Exploring major texts such as Beowulf, Odyssey, Divina Comedia, The Faerie Queene and Ulysses, this work will be a valuable resource for those studying the epic and English literature.

Lucrecia Martel has made only four feature films to date, but has nonetheless become one of the world's most admired directors. Her work is extraordinarily sensitive to the limits of sensory perception, the limits imposed by gender roles, and the limits of empathy and affect across social divisions. This edited collection broadens the critical conversation around Martel's work by integrating analyses of her features with the less frequently studied short films and her other artistic projects. This volume's fresh, holistic approach to Martel's career includes contributions from scholars in Latin America, Europe and the United States, and ends with a new interview with Martel herself.

This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examine the ways humans and nonhumans shape one another. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman. Contributors identify posthumanist themes across a range of different materials, including an anecdote about a plague of rabbits in Historia de las Indias by Spanish historian Bartolome de las Casas, photography depicting desert landscapes at the site of Brazil's War of Canudos, and digital and installation art portraying victims of state-sponsored and drug violence in Colombia and Mexico. The essays illuminate how these cultural texts broach the limits between life and death, human and animal, technology and the body, and people and the environment. They also show that these works use the category of the human to address issues related to race, gender, inequality, necropolitics, human rights, and the role of the environment.Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human demonstrates that by focusing on the boundary between the human and nonhuman, writers, artists, and scholars can open up new dimensions to debates about identity and difference, the local and the global, and colonialism and power.

"Sound of the Ax" brings together for the first time over four hundred aphorisms and twenty-six aphoristic poems by one of America's most essential poets of the twentieth century. Many readers are familiar with the trenchant nature of William Stafford's poems, with lines such as "Justice will take us millions of intricate moves" and "Your job is to find what the world is trying to be," but have never had the opportunity to read a sustained selection from the thousands of wise, witty, and penetrating statements he created in over forty years of daily writing in his journal. In keeping with Stafford's varied interests, the aphorisms in "Sound of the Ax" explore many topics--war and peace, involvement, aging, appearances, fear, egotism, writing, nature, animals, suffering, faith, living an ethical life, and so on--with his incisive view. The poems are either made up entirely or primarily aphorisms, and range from the well-known "Things I Learned Last Week" to some never before collected. Readers will find much to enjoy and to think about here, and will return over and over to "Sound of the Ax" for inspiration, pleasure, and wisdom from an author noted for his integrity and mindful living.

Houses, in the Argentine and Chilean films of the early 21st-century, provide much more than a backdrop to on-screen drama. Nor are they simply refuges from political turmoil or spaces of oppression. This volume argues that domestic spaces are instead the medium through which new, fragile common identities are constructed. The varied documentary and fiction films analyzed here face=Calibri>- which include an early work by Oscar-winner Sebastian Lelio face=Calibri>- use the domestic sphere as a laboratory in which to experiment with narrative, with audiovisual techniques, and with social configurations. Where previous scholarship has focused on the social fragmentation and political disillusionment visible in contemporary film, this book argues that in order to properly account for the political agency of cinema, it is necessary to move beyond deconstructive critical approaches to Latin American culture. In doing so, it expands the theoretical scope of studies in Latin American cinema by finding new points of contact between the cultural critique of Nelly Richard, the work of Bruno Latour, and theories of new materialism.

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
In this fourth collection of reflections on writing and the writing life, the late William Stafford's lifelong refusal to separate his work from the task of living responsibly -- "What a person is shows up in what a person does" -- rings clear.
The Answers Are Inside the Mountains collects unpublished interviews, poems, articles, aphorisms, and writing exercises from this great American man of letters and hugely prolific author, who kept a journal for nearly half a century and produced over 20,000 poems -- a staggering output by any standard.
The book begins with the words "To overwhelm by rightness," a phrase evoking the two demands Stafford made on himself: to write daily, and to live uprightly. The Answers Are Inside the Mountains lives up to those deceptively simple ethics, and confirms William Stafford's enduringly important voice for our uncertain age.
William Stafford (1914-93) authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl, You Must Revise Your Life, Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation, and Traveling Through the Dark, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.