This is the first volume to apply insights from the material turn in philosophy to the study of play and games. At a time of renewed interest in analogue gaming, as scholars are looking beyond the digital and virtual for the first time since the inception of game studies in the 1990s, Material Game Studies not only supports the importance of the (re)turn to the analogue, but proposes a materiality of play more broadly. Recognizing the entanglement of physical materiality with cultural meaning, the authors in this volume apply a range of theoretical approaches, from material eco-criticism to animal studies, to examine games and play as existing within worlds of matter. Different chapters focus on the material properties of board, card and role-playing games, how they are designed and made, how they are touched and played with, and how they connect with other human and nonhuman things. Bringing together international scholars, Material Game Studies defines a new field of material game studies and demonstrates how it is a valuable addition to wider debates about the material turn and the place of embodied humans in a material world.

Variously described as 'the average pilgrim', a 'wanderer', and 'a Buddha preaching in European clothes', Charlie Marlow is the voice behind Joseph Conrad's Youth (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Chance (1912). Newly available in paperback, Conrad's Marlow offers a comprehensive account and critical analysis of one of Conrad's most celebrated creations, asking both who and what is Marlow: a character or a narrator, a biographer or an autobiographical screen, a messenger or an interpreter, a bearer of truth or a misguided liar? Reading Conrad's fiction alongside the work of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, and offering an investigation into the connection between narrative and death, this book argues that Marlow's essence is located in his liminality - in his constantly shifting position - and that the emergence of meaning in his stories is at all points bound up with the process of his storytelling. -- .

Now in a fully updated second edition The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory is an indispensible guide for anyone approaching the field for the first time. Exploring ideas from a diverse range of disciplines through a series of 11 critical essays and a dictionary of key names and terms, this book examines some of the most complex and fundamental theories in modern scholarship including:

• Marxism
• Trauma Theory
• Ecocriticism
• Psychoanalysis
• Feminism
• Posthumanism
• Gender and Queer Theory
• Structuralism
• Narrative
• Postcolonialism
• Deconstruction
• Postmodernism

With three new essays, an updated introduction, further reading and a wealth of new dictionary entries, this text is an indispensible guide for all students of the theoretically informed arts, humanities and social sciences.

Puma – disentangled from the three-part structure of The End of the World News and published here for the first time in its intended format – is Anthony Burgess’s lost science fiction novel. Set some way into the future, the story details the crushing of the planet Earth by a heavyweight intruder from a distant galaxy – the dreaded Puma. It is a visceral book about the end of history as man has known it. Despite its apocalyptic theme, its earthquakes and tidal waves, murder and madness, Puma is a gloriously-comic novel, steeped in the rich literary heritage of a world soon to be extinguished and celebrating humanity in all its squalid glory. In Burgess’s hands this meditation on destruction, mitigated by the hope of salvation for a select few, becomes powerful exploration of friendship, violence, literature and science at the end of the world. -- .

Now in a fully updated second edition The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory is an indispensible guide for anyone approaching the field for the first time. Exploring ideas from a diverse range of disciplines through a series of 11 critical essays and a dictionary of key names and terms, this book examines some of the most complex and fundamental theories in modern scholarship including:

• Marxism
• Trauma Theory
• Ecocriticism
• Psychoanalysis
• Feminism
• Posthumanism
• Gender and Queer Theory
• Structuralism
• Narrative
• Postcolonialism
• Deconstruction
• Postmodernism

With three new essays, an updated introduction, further reading and a wealth of new dictionary entries, this text is an indispensible guide for all students of the theoretically informed arts, humanities and social sciences.