But perhaps the most shocking thing about Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is the fact that it is shaped by a thoroughly Christian vision. If the world she depicts is dark and terrifying, it is also the place where grace makes itself known. Her world—our world—is the stage whereon the divine comedy plays out; the freakishness and violence in O’Connor’s stories, so often mistaken for a kind of misanthropy or even nihilism, turn out to be a call to mercy.In this biography, Jonathan Rogers gets at the heart of O’Connor’s work. He follows the roots of her fervent Catholicism and traces the outlines of a life marked by illness and suffering, but ultimately defined by an irrepressible joy and even hilarity. In her stories, and in her life story, Flannery O’Connor extends a hand in the dark, warning and reassuring us of the terrible speed of mercy.

    Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James 's family, the European literary circles George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand 's The Metaphysical Club and McCullough 's The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.

    They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute’s involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman’s poetry to Ed Ruscha’s photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity’s only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.

    Tolkien’s own fiction. For decades, hobbits and the other fantastical creatures of Middle-earth have captured the imaginations of a fiercely loyal tribe of readers, all enhanced by the immense success of Peter Jackson’s films: first The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now his newest movie, The Hobbit. But for all Tolkien’s global fame and the familiarity of modern culture with Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, the sources of the great mythmaker’s own myth-making have been neglected.  Mark Atherton here explores the chief influences on Tolkien’s work: his boyhood in the West Midlands; the landscapes and seascapes which shaped his mythologies; his experiences in World War I; his interest in Scandinavian myth; his friendships, especially with the other Oxford-based Inklings; and the relevance of his themes, especially ecological ones, to the present day.

    Such is his prophetic insight that many of them are more relevant today – and funnier and more ironic – than when they were first published.This beautiful, colour-filled hardback includes some works not previously collected, along with an introduction by Leunig on how he creates: the process of discovering 'poetry and spirit in the playful winding path that the semiconscious pen makes on a piece of paper'. The Essential Leunig is a testament to the enduring appeal of a unique Australian artist.

     It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of some of his favorite writers (among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Proust). He writes about a few topics equally burning but less loved (the Nobel Prize–winner and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun; the Holocaust).   Finally, Gass ponders theoretical matters connected with literature: form and metaphor, and specifically, one of its genetic parts—the sentence.   Gass embraces the avant-garde but applies a classic standard of writing to all literature, which is clear in these essays, or, as he describes them, literary judgments and accounts. Life Sentences is William Gass at his Gassian best.The personals column: The literary miracle --Slices of life in a library --Spit in the mitt --The first fourth following 9/11 --What freedom of expression means, especially in times like these --Retrospection --Old favorites and fresh enemies: A wreath for the grave of Gertrude Stein --Reading Proust --Nietzsche: in illness and in health --Kafka: half a man, half a metaphor --Unsteady as she goes: Malcolm Lowry's cinema inferno --The bush of belief --Henry James's curriculum vitae --An introduction to John Gardner's Nickel mountain --Katherine Anne Porter's fictional self --Knut Hamsun --Kinds of killing --The Biggs lectures in the classics: Form: Eidos --Mimesis --Metaphor --Theoretics: Lust --Narrative sentences --The aesthetic structure of the sentence

    A Life with Books is an essay specially commissioned for Independent Booksellers Week, supplied exclusively to independent bookshops. In it, Julian Barnes writes about his early awareness of books and about his obsessive book-collecting and time spent in second-hand bookshops around the country. He ends by praising the physical book and expressing the confident hope that it will survive.A Life with Books is published as a pamphlet, with cover art by Suzanne Dean, the renowned designer responsible for the cover of Julian Barnes’ Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending.

    [W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.]

    Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.

    This book presents a splendid selection of sixty-five poems from across Frost's writing career, beginning in the 1890s and ending with "Directive" from the 1940s. Tim Kendall offers a detailed account of each poem, enabling readers to follow the journey which Frost himself recognized in all great poetry: "It begins in delight and ends in wisdom."In addition to close readings of the poems, The Art of Robert Frost traces the development of Frost's writing career and relevant aspects of his life. The book also assesses the particular nature of the poet's style, how it changes over time, and how it relates to the works of contemporary poets and movements, including Modernism.The first book on Frost to combine selected poems with a critical study, this appealing volume will be welcome on the shelves of scholars, students, and all other readers who love fine poetry.

    A vibrant text mapping the relevance of psychoanalysis across social sciences, humanities and the arts.

    Reynolds offers a fascinating look at the structure and meaning of the Qur'an, revealing the ways in which biblical language is used to advance the Qur'an's religious meaning. Reynolds' analysis identifies the motives that shaped each narrativeIslamic, Jewish, and Christian. The books conclusion yields a rich understanding of diverse interpretations of Islams emergence, suggesting that its emergence is itself ever-developing.

    Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly, animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns.Chen's book is the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory. Through analyses of dehumanizing insults, the meanings of queerness, animal protagonists in recent Asian/American art and film, the lead toy panic in 2007, and the social lives of environmental illness, Animacies illuminates a hierarchical politics infused by race, sexuality, and ability. In this groundbreaking book, Chen rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness—and demonstrates how attention to the affective charge of matter challenges commonsense orderings of the world.Mel Y. Chen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley."Animacies is a book about 'reworldings,' as Mel Y. Chen traces the myriad ways that objects and affects move through and reshape zones of possibility for political transformation and queer resistance to neoliberal biopolitics. At the same time, Animacies itself generates such transformations: grounded in a generous, expansive understanding of queer of color and disability/crip critique, Chen's study reworlds or reorients disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, animal studies, affect studies, and linguistics. In all of these critical spaces, Animacies might be described as the breathtaking and revivifying book we have been waiting for."—Robert McRuer, author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability"This ambitious transdisciplinary analysis of the relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and matter charts a compelling and innovative rethinking of the biopolitics of 'animacy.' Mel Y. Chen animates animacy, a concept of sentience hierarchy derived in linguistics, to offer a far-ranging critique that implicates disability studies, queer of color critique, and postcolonial theory. The generative result is a timely and crucial intervention that foregrounds the oft-occluded import of race and sex in the rapidly growing fields of posthumanist theory, new materialisms, and animal studies."—Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times

    Buildings and the cities they inhabit have become infrastructural – mobile, monetised networks. For the world’s power players, infrastructure space is a secret weapon, and the rest of us are only just beginning to realise.If Victor Hugo came back to give a TED talk, he might assert that architecture, which he once claimed had been killed by the book, is reincarnate as something more powerful still – as information itself. If this space is a secret weapon, says Keller Easterling, it is a secret best kept from those trained to make space – architects. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in economics, the social sciences, informatics and activism are developing what might be called spatial software as a political instrument to outwit politics as usual.

    The look and feel of Shakespeare's London, the streets, shops, and churches the poet would have visited; the bookstalls where he found source material; the objects that appeared on his stages or sparked his imagination--what were they like? Shakespeare: Staging the World presents an extraordinary collection of objects that evoke London in 1612, bringing to life not only Shakespeare the man, but also the characters, places, and events--real and imagined--featured in his plays. Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton give readers a visual tour of Renaissance London, letting us glimpse the time and place through a series of objects that speak volumes about Shakespeare's day. Simon Forman's diary of 1611 provides a vivid account of attending a contemporary performance of A Winter's Tale; a dagger fished from the Thames gives new resonance to the gang violence of Romeo and Juliet; Henry V's saddle, helm, and shield--medieval relics that would have been a familiar sight in Westminster Abbey to Shakespeare's fellow Londoners--recall the history plays and their examination of the nature and conduct of war; and Guy Fawkes's lantern illustrates the Catholic counterculture revealed through the failed Gunpowder Plot, which later provided the inspiration for Macbeth. Authoritative, evocative, and filled with surprises, Shakespeare: Staging the World offers a completely new approach to one of the most creative imaginations in history and opens a window onto a fascinating moment in London's past.

    At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food and visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning.Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children’s literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary “foodie” culture’s vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism, and race privilege.

    Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time--whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of being, or a transcendent afterlife. Martin Hagglund takes on these themes but gives them another reading entirely. The fear of time and death does not stem from a desire to transcend time, he argues. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in temporal life. From this vantage point, Hagglund offers in-depth analyses of Proust's "Recherche," Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," and Nabokov's "Ada."Through his readings of literary works, Hagglund also sheds new light on topics of broad concern in the humanities, including time consciousness and memory, trauma and survival, the technology of writing and the aesthetic power of art. Finally, he develops an original theory of the relation between time and desire through an engagement with Freud and Lacan, addressing mourning and melancholia, pleasure and pain, attachment and loss. "Dying for Time" opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.

    Shklovsky’s answers are wonderfully intimate, focusing particularly on the years of the early Soviet avant-garde, and his relationships with such figures as Eisenstein and Mayakovsky. Bearing witness to a vanished age whose promise ended in despair, Shklovsky is in great form throughout, summing up a century of triumphs and disappointments, personal and historical.

    The book includes Baltz's texts on Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Adams, Michael Schmidt, Allan Sekuka, Chris Burden, Thomas Ruff, Barry Le Va, Jeff Wall, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John McLaughlin, Slavica Perkovic and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others. This important publication gives Baltz's literary output the standing it deserves and offers a unique insight into some of history's leading photographers.Born in 1945 in Newport Beach, California, Lewis Baltz is a defining photographer of the last half-century. After studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and Claremont Graduate School, Baltz came to prominence with the New Topographics movement of the 1970s. His awards include a Guggenheim fellowship and the Charles Pratt Memorial Award, and his work is held in most major museum collections. Baltz's books with Steidl include 89-91, Sites of Technology (2007), Works (2010), The Prototype Works (2011) and Candlestick Point (2011).

    Joe Hall and Chad Hardy's THE CONTAINER STORE explores the construction, implementation, and erosion of economic and social authority, commodity, and corporeality. As both found and original language moves from domestic space to city, office-scape, and borderland (economic, political, bodily), it examines the (lack of) agency that the individual has in a world flooded with borders, bodies, commodities, contracts, and fragment. The work that Hall and Hardy undertake here is reminiscent of 20th century experimental movements such as Situationism, Futurism, and Dada, as well as 21st century net art like that of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. It is a mash up of high art and the profane, a typographical assault. The book itself is an enactment of the very spectacle that it reveals.

    Before his novel J R (1975) won Gaddis the National Book Award and some measure of renown, he had given up the bohemian world of 1950s Greenwich Village for a series of corporate jobs that both paid the bills and provided an inside view of the encroachment of market values into every corner of American culture.By illustrating the interconnectedness of Gaddis’s life and work, Tabbi, among his foremost interpreters, demystifies the “difficult author” and shows a writer who was as attuned as any to the way Americans talk, and who sensitively chronicled the gradual commodification of artistic endeavor. Illuminating, heartbreaking, and masterful, Tabbi’s book gives us the most subtly drawn portrait to date of one of the twentieth century’s seminal novelists.

    The authors examine why and how these famous actors have become some of the most respected and influential in the film world. Each title is divided into 10 chapters, each one dedicated to a specific role and fully documented with film stills, on-set photography and film sequences.

    Exercises and supplemental reading lists challenge authors to push their work into self-aware and surprising territory. In addition, ARCHITECTURES OF POSSIBILITY features something entirely lacking in most books about creative writing: more than 40 interviews with contemporary innovative authors, editors, and publishers (including Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Brian Evenson, Shelley Jackson, Ben Marcus, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Steve Tomasula, Deb Olin Unferth, and Joe Wenderoth) working in diverse media, providing significant insights into the multifaceted worlds of experimental writers' writing.

    Forster, John Gardner, and James Wood, Douglas Glover has produced a book on writing at once erudite, anecdotal, instructive, and amusing. Attack of the Copula Spiders represents the accumulated wisdom of a remarkable literary career: novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and mentor, Glover has for decades been asking the vital questions. How does the way we read influence the way we write? What do craft books fail to teach aspiring writers about theme, about plot and subplot, about constructing point of view? How can we maintain drama on the level of the sentence—and explain drama in the sentences of others? What is the relationship of form and art? How do you make words live?Whether his subject is Alice Munro, Cervantes, or the creative writing classroom, Glover’s take is frank and fresh, demonstrating again and again that graceful writers must first be strong readers. This collection is a call-to-arms for all lovers of English, and Attack of the Copula Spiders our best defense against the assaults of a post-literate age.Douglas Glover is the award-winning author of five story collections, four novels, and two works of non-fiction. He is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.Praise for Douglas Glover"A master of narrative structure." - Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life, Wall Street Journal"So sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into ... the author's poetic grace." - The New Yorker"Glover invents his own assembly of critical approaches and theories that is eclectic, personal, scholarly, and smart ... a direction for future literary criticism to take." - The Denver Quarterly"A ribald, raunchy wit with a talent for searing self-investigation." - The Globe and Mail"Knotty, intelligent, often raucously funny." - Maclean's"Passionately intricate." - The Chicago Tribune"Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless." - Kirkus Reviews

    Are we desensitized by the proliferation of these images, and does this make it easier to be passive and uninvolved? Or do the images immediately stir our own sense of justice and act as a call to arms? Are we consuming the suffering of others as a form of intrigue? Or is it an act of empathy? To answer these questions, Picturing Atrocity brings together essays from some of the foremost writers and critics on photography today, including Rebecca Solnit, Alfredo Jaar, Ariella Azoulay, Shahidul Alam, John Lucaites, Robert Hariman, and Susan Meiselas, to offer close readings of images that reveal the realities behind the photographs, the subjects, and the photographers. From the massacre of the Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, from famine in China to apartheid in South Africa, Picturing Atrocity examines a broad spectrum of photographs. Each of the essays focuses specifically on an iconic image, offering a distinct approach and context, in order to enable us to look again—and this time more closely—at the picture. In addition, four photo-essays showcase the work of photographers involved in the making of photographs of brutality as well as the artists’ own reflections on these images. Together these essays cover the historical and geographical range of atrocity photographs and respond to current concerns about such disturbing images; they probe why we as viewers feel compelled to look even when our instinct might be to look away. Picturing Atrocity is an important read, not just for insights into photography, but for its reflections on human injustice and suffering. In keeping with that aim, all royalties from the book will be donated to Amnesty International.

    Lomax’s camera was a constant companion, and his images of both legendary and anonymous folk musicians complement his famous field recordings.These photographs—largely unpublished—show musicians making music with family and friends at home, with fellow worshippers at church, and alongside workers and prisoners in the fields. Discussions of Lomax’s life and career by his disciple and lauded folklorist William Ferris, and a lyrical look at Lomax’s photographs by novelist and Grammy Award-winning music writer Tom Piazza, enrich this valuable collection.

    In the poets’ various treatments of things (that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of heretofore discrete factors: the avant-garde interest in objecthood and the racial question of objectification. By refashioning avant-garde investigations of things into questions about how American discourse visualizes race in and on the body, these poets implicitly critique dominant modes of racial visibility, seeking alternatives to the unreflective stances that identity politics often unwittingly reproduces. At the heart of Jeon’s project is the assumption thatracial form is continually recalibrated to elide ideological ambiguities and ambivalences in contemporary culture. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on the subject—on interiority and individual experience—Racial Things, Racial Forms also uses the calculated strangeness of the avant-garde art object as an occasion to emphasize the physical and visual oddness of racial constructs, as a series of everchanging, contemporary phenomena that are in conversation with, but not entirely determined by, their historical legacy. In this critical study, Jeon argues that by invoking the foreignness of an avant-garde art object as a way to understand racial otherness, these writers model the possibility of a post-identity, racial politics that challenges how race is fundamentally visualized. In addition to appealing to those interested in Asian American studies and race in American literature, Racial Things, Racial Forms addresses readers interested in contemporary poetry, art, and visual culture, paying particular attention to the intersections between literary and visual art.

    His formidable body of work challenges readers to think and perceive in ways that anticipate—with humor, insight, and cogency—much that has emerged in the field of literary theory over the past few decades. For David Cowart, Pynchon’s most profound teachings are about history—history as myth, as rhetorical construct, as false consciousness, as prologue, as mirror, and as seedbed of national and literary identities.In one encyclopedic novel after another, Pynchon has reconceptualized historical periods that he sees as culturally definitive. Examining Pynchon’s entire body of work, Cowart offers an engaging, metahistorical reading of V.; an exhaustive analysis of the influence of German culture in Pynchon’s early work, with particular emphasis on Gravity’s Rainbow; and a critical spectroscopy of those dark stars, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. He defends the California fictions The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice as roman fleuve chronicling the decade in which the American tapestry began to unravel. Cowart ends his study by considering Pynchon’s place in literary history.Cowart argues that Pynchon has always understood the facticity of historical narrative and the historicity of storytelling—not to mention the relations of both story and history to myth. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History offers a deft analysis of the problems of history as engaged by our greatest living novelist and argues for the continuity of Pynchon’s historical vision.

    Cockburn lines up a most wanted list of cliches, over-used phrases and tedious words and consigns them for execution. In his lethally sharp prose, the co-editor of the popular website and political newsletter CounterPunch inveighs against the corruption and debasement of common speech. He ridicules the use of hackneyed terms like "national conversation," "international community," and "sustainable development." This short, scorching pamphlet was Alexander Cockburn's final work; "Guillotined" was literally written on his deathbed. But the prose is fiery as ever. From the pen of one its greatest practitioners, Guillotined is a lucid and funny polemic about saving the English language from extinction.

    The artworks belong to different genres and media: photography, painting, installations, film, choreography and fashion design. Nevertheless, H�l�ne Cixous' texts all deal with some of her privileged themes: exile, war, violence (against women) and exclusion, as well as love, memory, beauty and tenderness.Neither art criticism nor critical essays, H�l�ne Cixous responds to these artworks as a poet, reading them as if they were poems. Written between 1985 and 2010, most of these essays are unpublished in English, or published only in rare catalogues or art books. Key Features*Combines poetic, theoretical and critical writing and Cixous' unique methodology*Addresses an important collection of contemporary artists, including Americans Nancy Spero and Roni Horn, the London artist Maria Chevska, the Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson, the filmmaker Ruth Bekermann, the French choreographer Karine Saporta and the French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel.*Treats a range of media and genre: photography, painting, installations, film, choreography, fashion design

    In the national imaginary, according to Chang, racial subjects are often perceived as the source of jouissance, which they supposedly embody through their excesses of violence, sexuality, anger, and ecstasy—excesses that threaten to overwhelm the social order.To examine her argument that racism ascribes too much, rather than a lack of, humanity, Chang analyzes domestic accounts by Asian American writers, including Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, and Suki Kim’s The Interpreter. Employing careful reading and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Chang finds sites of excess and shock: they are not just narratives of trauma; they produce trauma as well. They render Asian Americans as not only the objects but also the vehicles and agents of inhuman suffering. And, claims Chang, these novels disturb yet strangely exhilarate the reader through characters who are objects of racism and yet inhumanly enjoy their suffering and the suffering of others.Through a detailed investigation of “family business” in works of Asian American life, Chang shows that by identifying with the nation’s psychic disturbance, Asian American characters ethically assume responsibility for a national unconscious that is all too often disclaimed.

    In Reading for the Body, he calls for the field to be rematerialized and grounded in an awareness of the human body as the site where ideas, including ideas about the U.S. South itself, ultimately happen.Employing theoretical approaches to the body developed by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Colette Guillaumin, Elaine Scarry, and Friedrich Kittler, Watson also draws on histories of bodily representation to mine a century of southern fiction for its insights into problems that have preoccupied the region and nation alike: slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy; the marginalization of women; the impact of modernization; the issue of cultural authority and leadership; and the legacy of the Vietnam War. He focuses on the specific bodily attributes of hand, voice, and blood and the deeply embodied experiences of pain, illness, pregnancy, and war to offer new readings of a distinguished group of literary artists who turned their attention to the South: Mark Twain, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walker Percy.In producing an intensely embodied U.S. literature these writers, Watson argues, were by turns extending and interrogating a centuries-old tradition in U.S. print culture, in which the recalcitrant materiality of the body serves as a trope for the regional alterity of the South. Reading for the Body makes a powerful case for the body as an important methodological resource for a new southern studies.

    He is demanding new thinking toward objectives and processes and also humane capitalism! This also calls for the establishment of a creative-focused education (Creative Sciences) alongside today’s focus on natural sciences and the liberal arts. This applies not only to finding and promoting all creative talent at an early school age, but also to then communicate the necessary professional expertise so that we are all in the position to constructively address the huge challenges ahead.

    Besides delving into all the amusing aesthetic dreck, these reviews demonstrate how Twilight equips and motivates girls to get themselves deep into abusive relationships. The ebook also includes Wilson's Huffington Post article "50 Shades of Prey," which explains why it's no accident that the "mommy-porn" S&M bestseller 50 Shades of Grey began as Twilight fan-fiction.

    Catherine Wheatley's study of Michael Haneke's 2005 thriller Cache ('Hidden') explores how, in depicting the relationship between an affluent Parisian family and the Algerian outsider Majid, the film raises questions about home and the family, France's 'hidden' post-colonial past, spectatorship and screens.

    It redefined not only the DC Universe but what a crossover could be. In its scale, it exaggerated both the advantages and the downsides of the universe-wide crossover form. In this short book, Dr. Julian Darius explores the event from start to finish, including its place in the history of super-hero comics.(The contents of this book will be included in "Classics on Infinite Earths: The Justice League and DC Crossover Canon.")From Sequart Organization. More info at http://sequart.org

    From the show's production to its universally positive critical reception,this richly illustrated study includes Jacobs' astute analysis of the series' key themes and aesthetic strategies, arguing that the show not only marked a radical revision of the Western genre, but an outstanding work of television art.

    He is a unique and influential voice in American letters.Marcus was born in 1945 in San Francisco. In 1969 he published his first piece, a review of Magic Bus: The Who on Tour, in Rolling Stone, where he became the magazine's first records editor. Renowned for his ongoing "Real Life Top Ten" column, Marcus has been a writer for a number of magazines and websites and is the author and editor of over fifteen books. His critique is egalitarian--no figure, object, or event is too high, low, celebrated, or obscure for an inquiry into the ways in which our lives can open outward, often unexpectedly.In Conversations with Greil Marcus, Marcus discusses in lively, wide-ranging interviews his books and columns as well as his critical methodology and broad approach to his material, signaled by a generosity of spirit leavened with aggressive critical standards.

    With essays by the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, Richard Brookheiser, James Q. Wilson, Allen C. Guelzo, Victor Davis Hanson, Ross Douthat, and many others, this collection surveys the range of issues addressed in the Claremont Review of Books first decade, from the conservative critique of American progressivism to foreign policy, politics, history, and culture. Liberally illustrated with art director Elliot Banfield's popular cartoons, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness provides the magazine's many devotees with a treasured keepsake of a tumultuous decade and will be of interest to all those who care about American politics and culture. Among the contributors are Hadley Arkes, Martha Bayles, the late William F. Buckley, Jr., Paul Cantor, James Ceaser, Joseph Epstein, Christopher Flannery, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred McClay, Cheryl Miller, the late Jaroslav Pelikan, Joseph Tartakovsky, Michael Uhlmann, Algis Valiunas, William Voegeli, and the late James Q. Wilson.

    K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his verse, he has written on topics as resonant as war, social injustice, love, family, sex, death, depression, and intellectual despair and delight. He is also a gifted essayist, and In Time collects his best recent prose along with an illuminating series of interview excerpts in which he discusses a wide range of subjects, from his own work as a poet and translator to the current state of American poetry as a whole. In Time begins with six essays that meditate on poetic subjects, from reflections on such forebears as Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell to “A Letter to a Workshop,” in which he considers the work of composing a poem. In the book’s innovative middle section, Williams extracts short essays from interviews into an alphabetized series of reflections on subjects ranging from poetry and politics to personal accounts of his own struggles as an artist. The seven essays of the final section branch into more public concerns, including an essay on Paris as a place of inspiration, “Letter to a German Friend,” which addresses the issue of national guilt, and a concluding essay on aging, into which Williams incorporates three moving new poems. Written in his lucid, powerful, and accessible prose, Williams’s essays are characterized by reasoned and complex judgments and a willingness to confront hard moral questions in both art and politics. Wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful, In Time is the culmination of a lifetime of reading and writing by a man whose work has made a substantial contribution to contemporary American poetry.

    W. F. Hegel. While Hegel has been recognized as one of the key targets of Deleuze's philosophical writing, Henry Somers-Hall shows how Deleuze's antipathy to Hegel has its roots in a problem the two thinkers both try to address: getting beyond a philosophy of judgment and the restrictions of Kant's transcendental idealism. By tracing the development of their attempts to address this problem, Somers-Hall offers an interpretation of the sweep of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, providing a series of analyses of key moments in the history of thought, including the logics of Aristotle and Russell, Kant's own philosophy of judgment, and the philosophy of Bergson. He also develops a novel interpretation of Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and situates his philosophy in relation to the broader post-Kantian tradition. In addition to Deleuze's relation to Hegel, the book makes important contributions to the study of Deleuze's philosophy of mathematics, as well as to the study of several underappreciated areas of Hegel's own philosophy.

    A must-read for art and music fans interested in going beyond the stereotyped observations of Yoko as a Lennon hanger-on or inconsequential avant noisemaker.

    Published editions, dramatic performances and all kinds of adaptations of his works proliferated and his influence on authors and genres was extensive. By the second half of the century Shakespeare's status had been fully established, and since that time he has remained central to English culture. Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century explores the impact he had on various aspects of culture and society: not only in literature and the theatre, but also in visual arts, music and even national identity. The eighteenth century's Shakespeare, however, was not our Shakespeare. In recovering the particular ways in which his works were read and used during this crucial period in his reception, this book, with its many illustrations and annotated bibliography, is the clearest way into understanding this key phase in the reception of the playwright.

    The creator of the bracingly acerbic Pearls Before Swine, Stephan Pastis, gives a career-spanning interview to Tom Heintjes about lucky breaks, practicing law and why you don’t mess with Turks.

    It is the first book-length consideration of a writer and activist whose bold perspectives on social justice, race and gender have been influential for several decades. While academically critical, the essays mirror Cleage's own philosophical commitment to theoretical transparency and translation. The book includes an in-depth interview with the author and a foreword by former Cleage student and acclaimed novelist Tayari Jones in addition to essays from contributors representing an interdisciplinary cross-section of academic fields.

    For those requiring further clarification, however, Wilson himself has written an Afterword, explaining the 'Outsider Cycle', nearly 45 years on.

    Every human heart has a natural longing for "home," and these witnesses to the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth serve as a rich example of that universal yearning. Along the way, Loconte scrutinizes not only the challenges posed by popular skeptics, but also those created by counterfeit religion.Whether Christian or Muslim, priestly sex scandals or Islamic "honor killings," Loconte takes a sober look at the failings of those who claim God is on their side. The author never loses sight, however, of the profound influence that an authentic relationship with Jesus Christ can have on individuals and society. Ultimately, readers will see how the human desire for meaning, purpose, and love can lead us to our true home. There are still reasons to believe, reasons embedded in a remarkable conversation on the road to Emmaus.

    H. Abrams brings us a collection of nine new and recent essays that challenge the reader to think about poetry in new ways. In these essays, three of them never before published, Abrams engages afresh with pivotal figures in intellectual and literary history, among them Kant, Keats, and Hazlitt. The centerpiece of the volume is Abrams’s eloquent and incisive essay “The Fourth Dimension of a Poem” on the pleasure of reading poems aloud, accompanied by online recordings of Abrams’s revelatory readings of poems such as William Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy,” Alfred Tennyson’s “Here Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” and Ernest Dowson’s “Cynara.” The collection begins with a foreword by Abrams’s former student Harold Bloom.

    How will literature reconfigure itself in the future?The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on:the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fiction and code poetry the development of experimental genres from graphic narratives and found poetry through to gaming and interactive fiction experimental movements from Futurism and Surrealism to Postmodernism, Avant-Pop and Flarf. Shedding new light on often critically neglected terrain, the contributors introduce this vibrant area, define its current state, and offer exciting new perspectives on its future.This volume is the ideal introduction for those approaching the study of experimental literature for the first time or looking to further their knowledge.

    In Creole Indigeneity, Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana’s new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies.Looking particularly at the nation’s politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, Jackson explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, she reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles’ new identities.Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneity—a contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that Jackson terms “Creole indigeneity.” In doing so, her work establishes a new and productive way of understanding the relationship between national power and identity in colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial contexts.

    A travelogue that compares Reichenbach Falls and Trummelbach Falls for Professor Moriarty's demise; and notes from a visit to Trinity College at Oxford to view Monsignor Knox's writings and entries in the Gryphon Club Book provide the reader with engaging insights into Sherlock Holmes' world of scholarship.

    In contrast, Mark Goodacre makes the case that, instead of being an early, independent source, Thomas actually draws on the Synoptic Gospels as source material -- not to provide a clear narrative, but to assemble an enigmatic collection of mysterious, pithy sayings to unnerve and affect the reader. Goodacre supports his argument with illuminating analyses and careful comparisons of Thomas with Matthew and Luke.Watch the trailer:

    Karin Hedner Zetterholm introduces the legal, theological, and historical presuppositions that shaped the dominant stream of rabbinic interpretation, including Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrashim, discussing examples of different interpretive methods, and explores the contours of Jewish biblical interpretation evident in the New Testament and the legacy of ancient traditions in the way different Jewish movements read the Bible today. Students of the history of biblical interpretation and of Judaism will find this an important and engaging resource.

    Here are those underlying assumptions:"Criticism is not subject to the democratic process."I thank you for your kind attention, and now let's get on with it."Algis Budrys, November 1981

    

    It:explores the ways in which folklorists have defined the genre assesses the various methodologies used in the analysis and interpretation of fairy tale provides a detailed account of the historical development of the fairy tale as a literary form engages with the major ideological controversies that have shaped critical and creative approaches to fairy tales in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries demonstrates that the fairy tale is a highly metamorphic genre that has flourished in diverse media, including oral tradition, literature, film, and the visual arts.

    This is Jill Stoner's premise for a minor architecture. Her architect's eye tracks differently from most, drawn not to the lauded and iconic but to what she calls "the landscape of our constructed mistakes"--metropolitan hinterlands rife with failed and foreclosed developments, undersubscribed office parks, chain hotels, and abandoned malls. These graveyards of capital, Stoner asserts, may be stripped of their excess and become sites of strategic spatial operations. But first we must dissect and dismantle prevalent architectural mythologies that brought them into being--western obsessions with interiority, with the autonomy of the building-object, with the architect's mantle of celebrity, and with the idea of nature as that which is "other" than the built metropolis. These four myths form the warp of the book.Drawing on the literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Stoner suggests that minor architectures, like minor literatures, emerge from the bottoms of power structures and within the language of those structures. Yet they too are the result of powerful and instrumental forces. Provoked by collective desires, directed by the instability of time, and celebrating contingency, minor architectures may be mobilized within buildings that are oversaturated, underutilized, or perceived as obsolete.Stoner's provocative challenge to current discourse veers away from design, through a diverse landscape of cultural theory, contemporary fiction, and environmental ethics. Hers is an optimistic and inclusive approach to a more politicized practice of architecture.

    A passionate, erudite, and wide-ranging critic, he helped shape the landscape of modern literature. He reviewed the most celebrated writers of his age—from Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion to Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon. He championed Morrison’s work so ardently that she invited him to travel with her to Stockholm when she accepted her Nobel Prize.  He also contributed many pieces on television, film, politics, and the media, which continue to surprise and impress with their fervor and prescience.Reading for My Life is a monumental collection of Leonard’s most significant writings—spanning five decades—from his earliest columns for the Harvard Crimson  to his final essays for The New York Review of Books. Here are Leonard’s best writings—many never before published in book form—on the cultural touchstones of a generation, each piece a testament to his sharp wit, fierce intelligence, and lasting love of the arts. Definitive reviews of Doris Lessing, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Milan Kundera, and Philip Roth, among others, display his passion and nearly encyclopedic knowledge of literature in the second half of the twentieth century. His essay on Ed Sullivan and the evolution of television remains a classic. Throughout Leonard’s reviews and essays is a dedicated political spirit, pleading for social justice, advocating for the women’s movement, and forever calling attention to writers whose work challenged and excited him.With an introduction by E. L. Doctorow and remembrances by Leonard’s friends, family, and colleagues, including Gloria Steinem and Victor Navasky, Reading for My Life stands as a landmark collection from one of America’s most beloved and influential critics.

    Otto explores literary science fiction’s engagement with a central concern of our times: ecological degradation. Situated at the intersection of science fiction studies and environmental philosophy, Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism highlights key works of environmental science fiction that critique various human values for their roles in instigating such degradation.  The books receiving ecocritical treatment in Green Speculations include George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1972), Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1993, 1994, 1996), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Otto reads these and other important science fiction novels as educative in their representations of environmental issues and the environmental philosophies that have emerged in response to them.  Green Speculations demonstrates how environmental science fiction can be read not only as reflecting the ideas of environmental philosophies such as deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecosocialism, but also as instrumental in thinking through the tenets of these philosophies. As such, the book places science fiction at the center of environmentalism and considers the genre to be an essential tool for prompting needed social and cultural transformation.

    "The Rise and Fall of Meter" tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

    From critic and poet James Pollock comes "You Are Here," an incisive collection of essays that explore the newer, more cosmopolitan and technically sophisticated generation of Canadian poets.

    Drawing on scientific treatises, murder pamphlets, travel narratives, dream manuals, religious sermons, festive sports, and other fascinating primary sources, Lin reconstructs playgoers' typical ways of thinking and feeling and demonstrates how these culturally-trained habits of mind shaped not only dramatic narratives but also the presentational dynamics of onstage action. Combining literary criticism, theatre history, and performance theory, this ground-breaking study explodes received ideas about mimesis, spectacle, and semiotics as it uncovers the ways in which early modern performance functioned as a material medium, revising and producing social attitudes and practices.

    In this clear and comprehensive guide to Gadamer's thought, Karl Simms:presents an overview of Gadamer's life and works, outlining his importance to hermeneutic theory and its place in literary studies explains and puts into context his key ideas, including 'dialogue', 'phronēsis', 'play', 'tradition', and 'horizon' shows how Gadamer's ideas have been influential in the interpretation of literary texts explains Gadamer's debates with key contemporaries and successors, such as Habermas, Ricoeur and Derrida provides detailed suggestions for further reading.With a significance that crosses disciplinary boundaries from cultural studies, literary theory and philosophy through to history, music and fine arts, Gadamer's pioneering work on hermeneutic theory remains of crucial importance to the study of texts in the humanities.

    Among others, it defines the nature of the human storyteller; recalls the creation of the world and of the human race; describes the paradoxical role of the hero as both the Everyman and the radical exception; and establishes the complex quest underlying all human action. Epic illustrates that these ingredients of epic storytelling are universal cultural elements, in existence across multiple remote geographical locations, historical eras, ethnic and linguistic groups, and levels of technological and economic development.Frederick Turner argues that epic, despite being scoffed at and neglected for over sixty years, is the most fundamental and important of all literary forms and thereby deserves serious critical attention. It is the source and originof all other literature, the frame within which any story is possible. The mission of this book is to repair gaps in the literary understanding of epic studies--and offer permission to future epic writers and composers.The cultural genres of Marvel Comics, gothic, anime, manga, multi-user dungeon gaming, and superhero movies reprise all the epic themes and motifs. Consider The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Lost, The Matrix, Superman, Harry Potter, and Narnia. Here can be found the epic beast-man, the miraculous birth of the hero, the creation myth, the founding of the city, the quest journey, the descent into the land of the dead, the monsters, and the trickster. This book will be of interest to all readers fascinated by folklore, oral tradition, religious studies, anthropology, mythology, and enthusiastic about literature in general.

    He has probed the dynamics of Chinese and European literature and developed unique strategies for the writing of seventeen plays, two novels, a collection of short stories and a collection of poems. He has also written two collections of criticism. The present collection takes the title Aesthetics and Creation from the name of the Chinese collection from which most of these essays are drawn, but it also includes some of Gao's most recent unpublished essays. University of Sydney academic Mabel Lee is the translator, and the book also includes her authoritative introductory essay that contextualizes Gao's significant position as an independent and uncompromising voice in the noisy hype of the globalized world of the present in which creative writers and artists are forced to conform with the demands of political and other group agendas, or with market forces, in order to survive. In incisive and cogently argued essays, he exposes the political dynamics of so-called "modernity" in Western literature and art, and how this has been enthusiastically embraced in China since the 1980s. In other essays he analyses traditional and modern European and Chinese notions of fiction, theatre and art, and elaborates on what aspects of writers and artists from both cultures have informed him in developing his own aesthetics in narration, performance and the visual arts. These essays testify to the extent of the cosmopolitanism of his aesthetics that both informs and are manifested in his literary and art creations. This book has importance and relevance to the general reader with an interest in literature and art as a creative human pursuit that is not demarcated by national or cultural boundaries. This book is both indispensable and inspiring reading for intellectuals and informed readers who regard themselves as citizen of the world. For academics, researchers and students engaged in the disciplines of literature and visual art studies, world literature studies, comparative literature studies, performance studies, theatre studies, cultural studies, narrative fiction studies, and studies in the history of literature and the visual arts in modern times, this book is essential and thought-provoking reading that will have many positive outcomes.This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (General Editor: Victor H. Mair).

    Here, Laetitia Nanquette examines the functions, processes and mechanisms of stereotyping and imagining the "other" that have pervaded the literary traditions of France and Iran when writing about each other. She furthermore analyses Franco-Iranian relations, exploring the literary traditions of this relationship, the ways in which these have affected individual authors and reflect socio-political realities. With themes that feed into popular debates about the nature of Orientalism and Occidentalism, and how the two interact, this book will be vital for researchers of Middle Eastern literature and its relationship with writings from the West, as well as those working on the cultures of the Middle East.

    Department of Agriculture was the preeminent government filmmaking organization. In the United States, USDA films were shown in movie theaters, public and private schools at all educational levels, churches, libraries and even in open fields. For many Americans in the early 1900s, the USDA films were the first motion pictures they watched. And yet USDA documentaries have received little serious scholarly attention. The lack of serious study is especially concerning since the films chronicle over half a century of American farm life and agricultural work and, in so doing, also chronicle the social, cultural, and political changes in the United States at a crucial time in its development into a global superpower. Focusing specifically on four key films, Winn explicates the representation of African Americans in these films within the socio-political context of their times. The book provides a clearer understanding of how politics and filmmaking converged to promote a governmentally sanctioned view of racism in the U.S. in the early 20th century.

    Arguing that consensus is a central theme of the epic, David Elmer analyzes in detail scenes in which the poem’s three political communities—Achaeans, Trojans, and Olympian gods—engage in the process of collective decision making.These scenes reflect an awareness of the negotiation involved in reconciling rival versions of the Iliad over centuries. They also point beyond the Iliad’s world of gods and heroes to the here-and-now of the poem’s performance and reception, in which the consensus over the shape and meaning of the Iliadic tradition is continuously evolving.Elmer synthesizes ideas and methods from literary and political theory, classical philology, anthropology, and folklore studies to construct an alternative to conventional understandings of the Iliad’s politics. The Poetics of Consent reveals the ways in which consensus and collective decision making determined the authoritative account of the Trojan War that we know as the Iliad.

    During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who actually holds it? The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows - bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia and sociology - more or less concomitant inventions - had in common a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions inherit in it. The adventures of the conflict between these two realities - superficial versus real - provide the framework for this highly original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great masters of detective stories and spy novels - G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carre and Graham Greene among others - Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and imagination tell us something fundamental about the nature of modern societies and the modern state.

    To detractors, it dismantled everything good about the series.In this short book, Dr. Julian Darius argues that Giffen's run offered an ambitious and unprecedented response to the growing maturity of super-hero comics — one that, far from trashing Legion history, actually respected it.(The contents of this book previously appeared in Teenagers from the Future: Essays on the Legion of Super-Heroes.)From Sequart Research & Literacy Organization. More info at http://Sequart.org

    Living with a disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields--including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology--El Refaie shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one's self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.

    Covering a range of diverse contexts, the chapters focus on science, medicine, Queer theory, imperialism, nationalism, and gender. Together with further chapters on the ghost story, realism, the fin de si�cle, pulp fictions, sensation fiction, and the Victorian way of death, the Companion provides the most complete overview of the Victorian Gothic to date.The book is an essential resource for students and scholars working on the Gothic, Victorian literature and culture, and critical theory.Key Features*First multi-authored thorough exploration of the Victorian Gothic*Original research in all chapters*Sets the agenda for future scholarship in the field*Pedagogically awareKey WordsVictorian, Gothic, Science, Gender, Nationalism, Death, Supernatural, Ghost, Death

    It has been called 'one of the greatest short stories ever written' and 'a triumph of economy and force, minute realism and shimmering mystery' (Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years).Anatomy of a Short Story contains:- the full text of "Signs and Symbols," line numbered and referenced throughout the book- correspondence about the story, most of it never before published, between Nabokov and the editor of The New Yorker, where the story was first published- 33 essays of literary criticism on the story, bringing together classic essays and new interpretations- a round-table discussion in which a screenwriter, a theater scholar, a mathematician, a psychiatrist, and a literary scholar bring their perspectives to bear on 'Signs and Symbols'Anatomy of a Short Story illuminates the ways in which we interpret fiction, and the short story in particular.

    You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence is a critical, and at times hilarious survey of reviews of innovative Canadian poetry in English since 1961. What is at stake in the reviewing of poetry? What fantasies are inherent to the practice? How is poetry itself produced in the reviewing of poetry? Why has the reviewing of poetry remained largely invisible to self-reflexive critique? These are some of the many questions You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence dares to ask in its query to determine if poetry reviewers can claim to have the authority the imagine they have over their chosen subject. As a retort to the retrograde trend that is poetry reviewing in Canada, You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence is the first book to detail the production and structure of an "aesthetic conscience" and demonstrate how this functions as the dynamic administrative apparatus of any aesthetic ideology. In short, this book opens for the first time a new and desperately needed channel in Canadian criticism.This lively, engagingly written, and theoretically sophisticated study takes a provocatively pointed look at postmodern Canadian poetry through the revealing lenses of its reviews: their ideological and moral blindspots, their lamented critical belatedness, and the "ongoing positions war" of their canonization practices. Mancini's theorizing of the "aesthetic conscience" and his astute analysis of the discourse of the "craft" of poetry are major additions to the critical work on reviewing. This is a "must" for anyone interested in Canadian poetry - and reviewing. - Linda Hutcheon, Author of The Canadian Postmodern; A Poetics of Postmoderism: History, Theory, Fiction; The Politics of Postmodernism.

    Whether making found-footage films, hallucinatory ink-blot graphics, enigmatic collages, or assemblages from castoffs, Conner took up genres as quickly as he abandoned them. His movements within San Francisco's counter-cultural scenes were similarly free-wheeling; at home in beat poetry, punk music, and underground film circles, he never completely belonged to any of them. Bruce Conner belonged to Bruce Conner. Twice he announced his own death; during the last years of his life he produced a series of pseudonymous works after announcing his "retirement." In this first book-length study of Conner's enormously influential but insufficiently understood career, Kevin Hatch explores Conner's work as well as his position on the geographical, cultural, and critical margins. Hatch finds a set of abiding concerns that inform Conner's wide-ranging works and changing personas. A deep anxiety pervades the work, reflecting a struggle between private, unknowable, interior experience and a duplicitous world of received images and false appearances. The profane and the sacred, the comic and the tragic, the enigmatic and the universal: each of these antinomies is pushed to the breaking point in Conner's work. Generously illustrated with many color images of Conner's works, "Looking for Bruce Conner "proceeds in roughly chronological fashion, from Conner's notorious assemblages ( "BLACK DAHLIA" and "RATBASTARD" among them) through his experimental films (populated by images from what Conner called "the tremendous, fantastic movies going in my head from all the scenes I'd seen"), his little-known graphic work, and his collage and inkblot drawings.