Using the innovative concept of slow violence to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode.In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

    The Hall of Uselessness forms the most complete collection yet of Leys’ fascinating essays, from Quixotism to China, from the sea to literature.Leys feuds with Christopher Hitchens, ponders the popularity of Victor Hugo and analyses the posthumous publication of Nabokov’s unfinished novel. He offers valuable insights into Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge, and discusses Orwell, Waugh and Confucius. He considers the intertwined nature of Chinese art, culture and history alongside the joys and difficulties of literary translation. The Hall of Uselessness is an illuminating compendium from a brilliant and highly acclaimed writer – a long-time resident of Australia who is truly a global citizen.

    

    In these ambitious, bustling essays, McSweeney resituates poetry as a medium amid media; hosts “strange meetings” of authors, texts, and artworks across the boundaries of genre, period, and nation; and examines such epiphenomena as translation, anachronism, and violence. Through readings of artists as diverse as Wilfred Owen, Andy Warhol, Harryette Mullen, Roberto Bolaño, Aimé Césaire, and Georges Bataille, The Necropastoral shows by what strategies Art persists amid lethal conditions as a spectacular, uncanny force.

    R. R. Tolkien’s popularity has never been higher. In Green Suns and Faërie, author Verlyn Flieger, one of world’s foremost Tolkien scholars, presents a selection of her best articles―some never before published―on a range of Tolkien topics.The essays are divided into three distinct sections. The first explores Tolkien’s ideas of sub-creation–the making of a Secondary World and its relation to the real world, the second looks at Tolkien’s reconfiguration of the medieval story tradition, and the third places his work firmly within the context of the twentieth century and “modernist” literature. With discussions ranging from Tolkien’s concepts of the hero to the much-misunderstood nature of Bilbo’s last riddle in The Hobbit, Flieger reveals Tolkien as a man of both medieval learning and modern sensibility―one who is deeply engaged with the past and future, the regrets and hopes, the triumphs and tragedies, and above all the profound difficulties and dilemmas of his troubled century.Taken in their entirety, these essays track a major scholar’s deepening understanding of the work of the master of fantasy. Green Suns and Faërie is sure to become a cornerstone of Tolkien scholarship.

    She not only analyzes current trends, but also points the way forward, toward the most fruitful and powerful study we can have of God’s inspired Word.Bible Study: Following the Ways of the Word winsomely highlights not a rigid set of methods, but a clear approach to Bible study—one that acknowledges the Scripture for what it is and faithfully enables us to take in the very words of God and submit ourselves to them. It examines just what Bible study should involve, according to the truths and principles given to us in the Bible itself.

    Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics—on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces—in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as “luminous.”

    Magic is not simply a matter of the occult arts, but a whole way of thinking, of dreaming the impossible. As such it has tremendous force in opening the mind to new realms of achievement: imagination precedes the fact. It used to be associated with wisdom, understanding the powers of nature, and with technical ingenuity that could let men do things they had never dreamed of before. The supreme fiction of this magical thinking is The Arabian Nights, with its flying carpets, hidden treasure and sudden revelations. Translated into French and English in the early days of the Enlightenment, this became a best-seller among intellectuals, when it was still thought of in the Arab world as a mere collection of folk tales. For thinkers of the West the book's strangeness opened visions of transformation: dreams of flight, speaking objects, virtual money, and the power of the word to bring about change. Its tales create a poetic image of the impossible, a parable of secret knowledge and power. Above all they have the fascination of the strange -- the belief that true knowledge lies elsewhere, in a mysterious realm of wonder.As part of her exploration into the prophetic enchantments of the Nights, Marina Warner retells some of the most wonderful and lesser known stories. She explores the figure of the dark magician or magus, from Solomon to the wicked uncle in Aladdin; the complex vitality of the jinn, or genies; animal metamorphoses and flying carpets. Her narrative reveals that magical thinking, as conveyed by these stories, governs many aspects of experience, even now. In this respect, the east and west have been in fruitful dialogue. Writers and artists in every medium have found themselves by adopting Oriental disguise.With startling originality and impeccable research, this ground-breaking book shows how magic, in the deepest sense, helped to create the modern world, and how profoundly it is still inscribed in the way we think today.

    After her death in 1970, poet Basil Bunting wrote that she was “the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced . . . only beginning to be appreciated when she died.” Her poverty and arduous family life, the isolated home in Wisconsin that provided rich imagery for her work, and her unusual acquaintances have all contributed to Niedecker’s enigmatic reputation.    Margot Peters brings Lorine Niedecker’s life out of the shadows in this first full biography of the poet. She depicts Niedecker’s watery world on Blackhawk Island (near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin), where she was born and spent most of her life. A brief college career cut short by family obligations and an equally brief marriage were followed in 1931 by the start of a life-changing correspondence and complicated thirty-five-year friendship with modernist poet Louis Zukofsky, who connected Niedecker to a literary lifeline of distant poets and magazines. Supporting herself by turns as a hospital scrubwoman and proofreader for a dairy journal, Niedecker made a late marriage to an industrial painter, which gave her time to write and publish her work in the final decades of her life.    During her lifetime, Niedecker’s poetry was praised by a relatively small literary circle, including Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levetov, and Allen Ginsberg. Since her death much more of her surviving writings have been published, including a comprehensive edition of collected works and two volumes of correspondence. Through Margot Peters’s compelling biography, readers will discover Lorine Niedecker as a poet of spare and brilliant verse and a woman whose talent and grit carried her through periods of desperation and despair.Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

    Excellent for parish groups, high school programs, college classes, and graduate studies. The Study Guide does not replace Benedict XVI's book, but it makes it more accessible and beneficial to the average reader--whether lay, religious, or clergy--as well as the knowledgeable student. The Study Guide includes: An outline of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two - Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection; aconvenient chapter-by-chapter summary; alist of key terms; questions for understanding, reflection, application, and discussion; an easy-to-use glossary of important terms and persons; asection for readers to include their personal reflections on the reading."

    In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. Attack of the Difficult Poems, his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art.Applying an array of essayistic styles, Attack of the Difficult Poems ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail. Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature’s place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner.From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to Second Wave modernist poets, The Attack of the Difficult Poems sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.

    Why is that? What makes the heroes so at-tractive? Can we ever become like them? The power to be strong and valiant is not limited to Middle-earth. We have been given the same tools and gifts that they are offered if we but recognize them. The rings of power in our society tempt us and our children as well. We would be wise if we awakened to that which tries our souls. Take a look at this classic from a Christian perspec-tive, and you might bring Middle-earth a little bit closer to home.

    It needs the bold proclamation of God’s transforming vision to challenge its very human tendency toward expediency and self-interest — to jolt it into new insight and energy. For Luke Timothy Johnson, the New Testament books Luke and Acts provide that much-needed jolt to conventional norms. To read Luke-Acts as a literary unit, he says, is to uncover a startling prophetic vision of Jesus and the church — and an ongoing call for today’s church to embody and proclaim God’s vision for the world.

    Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his two classical Roman plays. Garry Wills, focusing his attention on Julius Caesar, here demonstrates how Shakespeare so wonderfully made these ancient devices vivid, giving his characters their own personal styles of Roman speech.In four chapters, devoted to four of the play’s main characters, Wills shows how Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius each has his own take on the rhetorical ornaments that Elizabethans learned in school. Shakespeare also makes Rome present and animate by casting his troupe of experienced players to make their strengths shine through the historical facts that Plutarch supplied him with. The result is that the Rome English-speaking people carry about in their minds is the Rome that Shakespeare created for them. And that is even true, Wills affirms, for today’s classical scholars with access to the original Roman sources.

    Tierney and Dirk W. Mosig to penetrating studies by Robert M. Price, William Murray, Steven J. Mariconda, and others.

    In Passing Strange, Ayanna Thompson explores the myriad ways U.S. culture draws on the works and the mythology of the Bard to redefine theboundaries of the color line.Drawing on an extensive--frequently unconventional--range of examples, Thompson examines the contact zones between constructions of Shakespeare and constructions of race. Among the questions she addresses are: Do Shakespeare's plays need to be edited, appropriated, updated, or rewritten to affirmracial equality and retain relevance? Can discussions of Shakespeare's universalism tell us anything beneficial about race? What advantages, if any, can a knowledge of Shakespeare provide to disadvantaged people of color, including those in prison? Do the answers to these questions impact ourunderstandings of authorship, authority, and authenticity? In investigating this under-explored territory, Passing Strange examines a wide variety of contemporary texts, including films, novels, theatrical productions, YouTube videos, performances, and arts education programs.Scholars, teachers, and performers will find a wealth of insights into the staging and performance of familiar plays, but they will also encounter new ways of viewing Shakespeare and American racial identity, enriching their understanding of each.

    Most of the verses are found in Daniel and Ezra. Basics of Biblical Aramaic follows the same easy-to-understand style found the widely-used Basics of Biblical Hebrew and includes everything you need to learn Biblical Aramaic. This book is designed for those who already have a working knowledge of Biblical Hebrew. Basics of Biblical Aramaic features: -Complete lexicon of Biblical Aramaic -Complete annotated text of all 269 Bible verses written in Aramaic -Chapter exercises -Answer key

    In "Ingratitude," erin Khue Ninh explores this apparent paradox, locating in the origins of these women's maddeningly immaterial suffering not only racial hegemonies but also the structure of the immigrant family itself. She argues that the filial debt of these women both demands and defies repayment--all the better to produce the docile subjects of a model minority.Through readings of Jade Snow Wong's "Fifth Chinese Daughter," Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior," Evelyn Lau's "Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid," Catherine Liu's "Oriental Girls Desire Romance," and other texts, Ninh offers not an empirical study of intergenerational conflict so much as an explication of the subjection and psyche of the Asian American daughter. She connects common literary tropes to their theoretical underpinnings in power, profit, and subjection. In so doing, literary criticism crosses over into a kind of collective memoir of the Asian immigrants' daughter as an analysis not of the daughter, but for and by her.

    The collection's three sections address broad issues related to genre, Harry Potter's development as the central heroic character and the question of who qualifies as a hero in the Harry Potter series. Among the topics are Harry Potter as both epic and postmodern hero, the series as a modern-day example of psychomachia, the series' indebtedness to the Gothic tradition, Harry's development in the first six film adaptations, Harry Potter and the idea of the English gentleman, Hermione Granger's explicitly female version of heroism, adult role models in Harry Potter, and the complex depictions of heroism exhibited by the series' minor characters. Together, the essays suggest that the Harry Potter novels rely on established generic, moral and popular codes to develop new and genuine ways of expressing what a globalized world has applauded as ethically exemplary models of heroism based on responsibility, courage, humility and kindness.

    This book takes its title from the first essay, a startlingly original interpretation of Proust. By way of Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and the work of Melanie Klein, Sedgwick establishes the sense of refreshment and surprise that the author of the Recherche affords his readers. Proust also figures in pieces on the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, object relations, affect theory, and Sedgwick’s textile art practices. More explicitly connected to her role as a pioneering queer theorist are an exuberant attack against reactionary refusals of the work of Guy Hocquenghem and talks in which she lays out her central ideas about sexuality and her concerns about the direction of US queer theory. Sedgwick lived for more than a dozen years with a diagnosis of terminal cancer; its implications informed her later writing and thinking, as well as her spiritual and artistic practices. In the book’s final and most personal essay, she reflects on the realization of her impending death. Featuring thirty-seven color images of her art, The Weather in Proust offers a comprehensive view of Sedgwick’s later work, underscoring its diversity and coherence.

    Ellis argues that throughout slavery, the Jim Crow era, and more recently in the proliferation of the prison industrial complex, the violent threat of death has functioned as a coercive disciplinary practice of social control over black men. In this provocative volume, Ellis delves into a variety of literary and cultural texts to consider unlawful and extralegal violence like lynching, mob violence, and "white riots," in addition to state violence such as state-sanctioned execution, the unregulated use of force by police and prison guards, state neglect or inaction, and denial of human and civil rights.Focusing primarily on young black men who are depicted or see themselves as "bad niggers," gangbangers, thugs, social outcasts, high school drop-outs, or prison inmates, Ellis looks at the self-affirming embrace of deathly violence and death-defiance-both imagined and lived-in a diverse body of cultural works. From Richard Wright's literary classic Native Son, Eldridge Cleaver's prison memoir Soul on Ice, and Nathan McCall's autobiography Makes Me Wanna Holler to the hip hop music of Eazy-E, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and D'Angelo, Ellis investigates black men's representational identifications with and attachments to death, violence, and death-defiance as a way of coping with and negotiating late-twentieth and early twenty-first century culture.Distinct from a sociological study of the material conditions that impact urban black life, If We Must Die investigates the many ways that those material conditions and lived experiences profoundly shape black male identity and self-image. African Amerian studies scholars and those interested in race in contemporary American culture will appreciate this thought-provoking volume.

    The guide contains information on the International Phonetic Alphabet, iambic pentameter, and the Great Vowel Shift. It also has word lists and transcription exercises. Refined during four decades of Beidler's own teaching, this booklet is now widely available for the first time.

    Focusing on the novel's retrospective narrator, whom he identifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried self, John Jordan offers provocative new readings of the novel's narrative structure, its illustrations, its multiple and indeterminate endings, the role of its famous detective, Inspector Bucket, its many ghosts, and its relation to key events in Dickens's life during the years 1850 to 1853.Jordan draws on insights from narratology and psychoanalysis in order to explore multiple dimensions of Esther's complex subjectivity and fractured narrative voice. His conclusion considers Bleak House as a national allegory, situating it in the context of the troubled decade of the 1840s and in relation to Dickens's seldom-studied A Child's History of England (written during the same years as his great novel) and to Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Supposing "Bleak House" claims Dickens as a powerful investigator of the unconscious mind and as a "popular" novelist deeply committed to social justice and a politics of inclusiveness.Victorian Literature and Culture Series

    Celebrated law professor and author Kenji Yoshino delves into ten of the most important works of the Immortal Bard of Avon, offering prescient and thought-provoking discussions of lawyers, property rights, vengeance (legal and otherwise), and restitution that have tremendous significance to the defining events of our times—from the O.J. Simpson trial to Abu Ghraib. Anyone fascinated by important legal and social issues—as well as fans of Shakespeare-centered bestsellers like Will in the World—will find A Thousand Times More Fair an exceptionally rewarding reading experience.

    Andrew D. Kaufman’s broad and accessible analysis of Tolstoy’s work speaks to the ways in which Tolstoy, despite living in a manner far removed from the experiences of most modern-day Americans, is still applicable and contemporary.From a reconstruction of Olenin’s search for truth in The Cossacks to an illuminating analysis of Hadji-Murat’s tragic last stand, Understanding Tolstoy brings to life the fascinating parallels between Tolstoy’s personal quest and his characters’ journeys. Whether writing about the ballrooms and battlefields of War and Peace or the spectrum of sexual and spiritual attachments in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy emerges as a vital, searching artist who continually grows and surprises us, yet is driven by a single, unchanging belief in universal human truths.Understanding Tolstoy is a treasure trove of critical and philosophical insights that will appeal to Tolstoy aficionados of all kinds, from advanced scholars to undergraduate students. The book offers an eminently readable guide to those entering Tolstoy’s world for the first time or the tenth, and it invites them to grapple alongside the writer and his characters with the most urgent existential questions of our time, and all times.

    Novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in mainstream developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. The intertwined tropes offrozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the reimagination of colonial space at the fin-de-si�cle. The genre-bending logic of uneven development - never wholly absent from the coming-of-age novel --takes on a new and more intense form in modernism as it fixes its broken allegory to the problem of colonial development. In novels of unseasonable youth, the nineteenth-century idea of world progress comes up against stubborn signs of underdevelopment and uneven development, just at the same momentthat post-Darwinian racial sciences and quasi-Freudian sexological discourses lend greater influence to the idea that certain forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing or developmental forces. In this historical context, the temporal meaning and social vocation of the bildungsromanundergo a comprehensive shift, as the history of the novel indexes the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.

    History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.""The problem with being a pain in the ass is that you never quite know who's trying to get you.""Why do people keep insisting that I join the 21st Century? I *LIVE* in the 21st Century! I just don't want to be bothered by the shitheads on the internet!""I have no mouth. And I must scream.""I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar."

    The history of philosemitism provides a corrective to that abysmal view, a reminder of the venerable religion and people that have been an inspiration for non-Jews as well as Jews.There is a poetic justice – or historic justice – in the fact that England, the first country to expel the Jews in medieval times, has produced the richest literature of philosemitism in modern times.From Cromwell supporting the readmission of the Jews in the 17th century, to Macaulay arguing for the admission of Jews as Members of Parliament in the 19th century, to Churchill urging the recognition of the state of Israel in the 20th, some of England's most eminent writers and statesmen have paid tribute to Jews and Judaism. Their speeches and writing are powerfully resonant today. As are novels by Walter Scott, Disraeli, and George Eliot, which anticipate Zionism well before the emergence of that movement and look forward to the state of Israel, not as a refuge for the persecuted, but as a "homeland" rooted in Jewish history.A recent history of antisemitism in England regretfully observes that English philosemitism is "a past glory." This book may recall England – and not only England – to that past glory and inspire other countries to emulate it. It may also reaffirm Jews in their own faith and aspirations.

    Writing the Love of Boys looks at the response to this mindset during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological.Jeffrey Angles focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. He traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet Murayama Kaita, the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shiro, the anthropologist Iwata Jun’ichi, and the avant-garde innovator Inagaki Taruho.Writing the Love of Boys shows how these authors interjected the subject of male–male desire into discussions of modern art, aesthetics, and perversity. It also explores the impact of their efforts on contemporary Japanese culture, including the development of the tropes of male homoeroticism that recur so often in Japanese girls’ manga about bishonen love.

    Yet no study has considered how writers from the so-called Orient approach this idea. Awide-ranging survey of the vast and diverse world of Anglophone Arab literature, Immigrant Narratives examines the complex ways in which Arab �migr�s contend with, resist, and participate in the problems of Orientalism.Hassan's account begins in the early twentieth century, as he considers the pioneering Lebanese American writers, Ameen Rihani and Kahlil Gibran. The former's seminal novel, The Book of Khalid sought to fuse Arabic and European literary traditions in search of a civilizational synthesis, whereas thelatter found success by mixing Hindu, Christian, mystical, and English Romantic ideas into a popular spiritualism. Hassan then considers Arab immigrant life-writing, ranging from autobiographies by George Haddad and Abraham Rihbany to memoirs of exile by the Egyptian-born Leila Ahmed andPalestinian refugees like Fawaz Turki and Edward Said. Hassan considers issues of representation in looking to how Arab immigrant writers like Ramzi Salti and Rabih Alameddine use homosexuality to reflect on Arab typecasting. Ahdaf Soueif's fiction reflects her growing awareness of the politics ofreception of Anglophone Arab women writers while Leila Aboulela's fiction, inspired by an immigrant Islamic perspective, depicts the predicament of the Muslim minority in Britain.Drawing upon postcolonial, translation, and minority discourse theory, Immigrant Narratives investigates how key writers have described their immigrant experiences, acting as mediators and interpreters between cultures, and how they have forged new identities in their adopted countries.

    She is also among the most wide ranging, with books on Zionism, feminism, Sylvia Plath, children’s fiction, and psychoanalysis. During the past decade, through talks and pieces that Rose has contributed to the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and other publications, she has played a vital role in public debate about the policies and human-rights record of Israel in its relation to the Palestinians. Representing the entire spectrum of her writing, The Jacqueline Rose Reader brings together essays, reviews, and book excerpts, as well as an extract from her novel. In the introduction, the editors provide a profound overview of her intellectual trajectory, highlighting themes that unify her diverse work, particularly her commitment to psychoanalytic theory as a uniquely productive way of analyzing literature, culture, politics, and society. Including extensive critical commentary, and a candid interview with Rose, this anthology is an indispensable introduction for those unfamiliar with Jacqueline Rose’s remarkably original work, and an invaluable resource for those well acquainted with her critical acumen.

    In this concise book, Jane Gallop revitalizes this hackneyed concept by considering not only the abstract theoretical death of the author but also the writer's literal death, as well as other authorial "deaths" such as obsolescence. Through bravura close readings of the influential literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she shows that the death of the author is best understood as a relation to temporality, not only for the reader but especially for the writer. Gallop does not just approach the death of the author from the reader's perspective; she also reflects at length on how impending death haunts the writer. By connecting an author's theoretical, literal, and metaphoric deaths, she enables us to take a fuller measure of the moving and unsettling effects of the deaths of the author on readers and writers, and on reading and writing.

    What she learned instead were brutal truths about women’s rights, the politics of corruption, the failures of democracy, the mechanism of globalization, and a profound emotional connection that can only be called love. Moore’s fascinating story from the cusp of the global economic meltdown is a look at her time with the first all-women’s dormitory in the history of the country, just kilometers away from the notorious Killing Fields. Her tale is a noble one, as heartbreaking as it is hilarious; staunchly ethical yet conflicted and human.Moore’s in-depth examination of her stint among the first large group of social-justice-minded young women from the impoverished provinces is told in intimate, mood-evocative, beautifully-written first-person prose. Cambodian Grrrl is the first in a series of short essay collections on contemporary media, art, and educational work by, for, and with young women in Southeast Asia. Part memoir and part investigative report, Moore’s story could only be told by her. The result is illuminating, vital reading.

    Tolkien. Since Tolkien drew from many disparate sources, an understanding of these sources, as well as how and why he incorporated them, can enhance readers' appreciation. This set of new essays by leading Tolkien scholars describes the theory and methodology for proper source criticism and provides practical demonstrations of the approach.

    This Companion provides tools for meeting that challenge. Comprehensive, accessible, lively, up-to-date and reliable, it approaches Pynchon's fiction from various angles, calling on the expertise of an international roster of scholars at the cutting edge of Pynchon studies. Part I covers Pynchon's fiction novel-by-novel from the 1960s to the present, including such indisputable classics as The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. Part II zooms out to give a bird's-eye-view of Pynchon's novelistic practice across his entire career. Part III surveys major topics of Pynchon's fiction: history, politics, alterity ('otherness'), and science and technology. Designed for students, scholars and fans alike, the Companion begins with a biography of the elusive author and ends with a coda on how to read Pynchon and a bibliography for further reading.

    Joe Aisenberg's dissection of Carrie is, amazingly, the first book-length critical study on this film ever released. In fact, so little has been written on Carrie in a critical fashion that Joe found, to his delight and horror, that he had the field pretty much all to himself. He has conducted new interviews with Brian DePalma, screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen, and cast members, including cult legend P.J. Soles, with an in-depth analysis of plot and influence.

    Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. The book s eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, address a significant aspect of the novel's manifold interests. By focusing on three major thematic trajectories (the novel's narrative strategies; its commentary on science, belief, and faith; and its views on politics and economics), the contributors contend that Against the Day is not only a major addition to Pynchon's already impressive body of work, but also a defining moment in the emergence of twenty-first century American literature."

    Many of her poems depict such struggles, sometimes with humor and sometimes with despair. Reading and reflecting on these poems can be a powerful way to listen to and experience God through the arts. Mending a Tattered Faith presents, first, an accessible introduction to the mysteries of Dickinson's life and poetry, considering her relationships to her family and the church, the significant poetic strategies she employed, and the dramatic family struggle over publishing her poetry that began soon after her death. It then offers twenty-nine carefully selected poems by Dickinson, each with an accompanying meditation. By helping readers unpack Dickinson's intense but brief poems, supplying absorbing historical background and information, and relating some personal stories and reflections, this book encourages readers to embark upon their own meditative journey with Dickinson, whose engaging struggles with faith and doubt can help illuminate our own spiritual questions, sorrows, and joys. Endorsements: ""Who's afraid of Emily Dickinson? Not me, when I've got Susan Emily VanZanten at my side. Precise, elegant, and evocative, VanZanten guides the reader through the spiritual tangles of Dickinson's verse in ways that enlighten and refresh the soul. This is a book to keep and to treasure."" --Paul J. Willis author of Rosing from the Dead: Poems ""I've never read a book quite like this, and I'm hoping it will inspire a new genre: engaged reading, slow reading, deeply informed by scholarship but inviting to all."" --John Wilson Editor, Books & Culture About the Contributor(s): Susan VanZanten is Professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. She is the author of Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South African Literature (2002), the editor of Postcolonial Literature and the Biblical Call to Justice (1994), and co-author (with Roger Lundin) of Literature through the Eyes of Faith (1989).

    but also in which ideas about architecture became a prominent part of broader conversations about American culture, history, politics, and--although we have not yet understood this clearly--race relations. This rich and copiously illustrated interdisciplinary study explores the ways that American writing between roughly 1850 and 1930 concerned itself, often intensely, with the racial implications of architectural space primarily, but not exclusively, through domestic architecture.In addition to identifying an archive of provocative primary materials, Sites Unseen draws significantly on important recent scholarship in multiple fields ranging from literature, history, and material culture to architecture, cultural geography, and urban planning. Together the chapters interrogate a variety of expressive American vernacular forms, including the dialect tale, the novel of empire, letters, and pulp stories, along with the plantation cabin, the West Indian cottage, the Latin American plaza, and the "Oriental" parlor. These are some of the overlooked plots and structures that can and should inform a more comprehensive consideration of the literary and cultural meanings of American architecture. Making sense of the relations between architecture, race, and American writing of the long nineteenth century--in their regional, national, and hemispheric contexts--Sites Unseen provides a clearer view not only of this catalytic era but also more broadly of what architectural historian Dell Upton has aptly termed the social experience of the built environment.

    The word essay brings to mind the uninspired five-paragraph theme taught in schools around the country or the antiquated, Edwardian meanderings of English gentlemen rattling on about art and old books. These connotations exist despite the fact that Americans have been reading and enjoying personal essays in popular magazines for decades, engaging with a multitude of ideas through this short-form means of expression. To defend the essay—that misunderstood staple of first-year composition courses—Ned Stuckey-French has written The American Essay in the American Century. This book uncovers the buried history of the American personal essay and reveals how it played a significant role in twentieth-century cultural history. In the early 1900s, writers and critics debated the “death of the essay,” claiming it was too traditional to survive the era’s growing commercialism, labeling it a bastion of British upper-class conventions. Yet in that period, the essay blossomed into a cultural force as a new group of writers composed essays that responded to the concerns of America’s expanding cosmopolitan readership. These essays would spark the “magazine revolution,” giving a fresh voice to the ascendant middle class of the young century. With extensive research and a cultural context, Stuckey-French describes the many reasons essays grew in appeal and importance for Americans. He also explores the rise of E. B. White, considered by many the greatest American essayist of the first half of the twentieth century whose prowess was overshadowed by his success in other fields of writing. White’s work introduced a new voice, creating an American essay that melded seriousness and political resolve with humor and self-deprecation. This book is one of the first to consider and reflect on the contributions of E. B. White to the personal essay tradition and American culture more generally. The American Essay in the American Century is a compelling, highly readable book that illuminates the history of a secretly beloved literary genre. A work that will appeal to fiction readers, scholars, and students alike, this book offers fundamental insight into modern American literary history and the intersections of literature, culture, and class through the personal essay. This thoroughly researched volume dismisses, once and for all, the “death of the essay,” proving that the essay will remain relevant for a very long time to come.

    Although primarily a novelist and essayist, thechameleon of British letters has also written short stories, television scripts and a screenplay. This critical guide provides a wide range of current critical perspectives on Barnes work from early bestselling novels Flauberts Parrot and The History of the World in 10 Chapters up to Arthur and George. Including contributions by some of the finest critics working in the contemporary field, it reflects the richness and diversity of one of Britains greatest living writers.' to 'An up-to-date critical collection on the work of contemporary British novelist, Julian Barnes.

    In an effort to adapt his poetry to his place of Henry County, Kentucky, Berry discovered an enduringly useful example in the work of William Carlos Williams. In Williams’ commitment to his place of Rutherford, New Jersey, Berry found an inspiration that inevitably influenced the direction of his own writing.Both men would go on to establish themselves as respected American poets, and here Berry sets forth his understanding of that evolution for Williams, who in the course of his local membership and service, became a poet indispensable to us all.

    . . is the Human Existence itself.” But why are imagination and creation—so vital for Blake—essential for becoming human? And what is imagination? What is creation? How do we create? Blake had answers for these questions, both in word and in deed, answers that serve as potent teachings for aspiring writers and accomplished ones alike. Eric G. Wilson’s My Business Is to Create emulates Blake, presenting the great figure’s theory of creativity as well as the practices it implies.      In both his life and his art, Blake provided a powerful example of creativity at any cost—in the face of misunderstanding, neglect, loneliness, poverty, even accusations of insanity. Just as Los cries out in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's; / I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create,” generations of writers and artists as diverse as John Ruskin, William Butler Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Philip K. Dick, songwriter Patti Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and the underground comic-book artist R. Crumb have taken Blake’s creed as inspiration.      Unwilling to cede his vision, Blake did more than simply produce iconoclastic poems and paintings; he also cleared a path toward spiritual and ethical enlightenment. To fashion powerful art is to realize the God within and thus to feel connected with enduring vitality and abundant generosity. This is Blake’s everlasting gospel, distilled here in an artist’s handbook of interest to scholars, writing teachers, and those who have made writing their way of life. My Business Is to Create is indispensable for all serious artists who want to transform their lives into art and make their art more alive.

    Through a series of specific questions thatcut to the core of conspiracism as a global social and cultural phenomenon, this bookdeconstructs the logic and rhetoric of conspiracy theories and analyzes the broader social and psychological factors that contribute to their persistence in modern society.

    Why is this? Michael Austin asks, in Useful Fictions. Why, in particular, are human beings, whose very survival depends on obtaining true information, so drawn to fictional narratives? After all, virtually every human culture reveres some form of storytelling. Might there be an evolutionary reason behind our species’ need for stories? Drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology, narrative theory, cognitive psychology, game theory, and evolutionary aesthetics, Austin develops the concept of a “useful fiction,” a simple narrative that serves an adaptive function unrelated to its factual one. In his work we see how these useful fictions play a key role in neutralizing the overwhelming anxiety that humans can experience as their minds gather and process information. Rudimentary narratives constructed for this purpose, Austin suggests, provided a cognitive scaffold that might have become the basis for our well-documented love of fictional stories. Written in clear, jargon-free prose and employing abundant literary examples—from the Bible to One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and Don Quixote to No Exit—Austin’s work offers a new way of understanding the relationship between fiction and evolutionary processes—and, perhaps, the very origins of literature.

    The chapters are clearly organized by topic, and significant attention is paid to key individual works, including Beowulf, The Seafarer and writings by Bede. All textual quotations are translated into Modern English, with the original language texts carefully explained. The Introduction synthesizes and develops dominant approaches to Anglo-Saxon literature today, integrating Old English and Latin traditions, and placing the literature in larger historical and theoretical contexts. The structure, style and layout are attractive and user-friendly, including illustrative figures and text boxes, and it provides guidance on resources for studying Anglo-Saxon literature, informing the reader of opportunities for investigating the subject further. Overall, the book enables a thorough understanding and appreciation of artful and eloquent works from a distant past, which still speak powerfully to people today.

    Her stories are often on the borderline of memoir, and vice versa. From her college days, she could find the most astonishing yet thoroughly apt metaphors to illuminate her ideas. This volume—edited by the poet, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, and Bishop scholar Lloyd Schwartz—includes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Here are her famous as well as her lesser-known stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, and—for the first time—her original draft of Brazil, the Time/Life volume she repudiated in its published version, and the correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson, the author of the first book-length volume devoted to Bishop.

    The Arden Shakespeare is the leading authority of Shakespeare scholarship in the world and this unique reference tool summarizes decades of scholarly research, debate and insight to make it a truly invaluable resource. The book is arranged thematically with a full index and features scholarship on these key topics: Theatres and Players; Controversies; Shakespeare the Writer; Facts and Figures; Shakespeare and Language; Afterlife; Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays; A Biographical Chronology.

    Dick was one of the most popular science fiction novelists of the 20th century, but the contradictory and wily writer has troubled critics who attempt encompassing explanations of his work. This book examines Dick's writing through the lens of ontological uncertainty, providing a comparative map of his oeuvre, tracing both the interior connections between books and his allusive intertextuality. Topics covered include time travel, alternate worlds, androids and simulacra, finite subjective realities and schizophrenia. Twenty novels are explored in detail, including titles that have received scant critical attention. Some of his most important short stories and two of his realist novels are also examined, providing a general introduction to Dick's body of work.

    John's structural patterns, repetitions, and narrative interventions invite readers to experience for themselves the beauty of the divine poem. John in the Company of Poets deepens this invitation by re-imagining the biblical text through the eyes of such artists as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, and T. S. Eliot, offering a literary reading of the Gospel based upon their powerful poetic replies. Poets are our best readers, contends Gardner, and his deft analysis forges a fresh path into the issues and tensions of John's Gospel.--John Bayon "Moody Theological Seminary Library Blog"

    Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel.More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

    Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. Applying prosodic analysis to emphasize the musicality of African American poetic performance, she examines the gendered meanings evident in collaborative performances and in the criticism, images, and sounds circulating within jazz cultures.Jones also considers poets who participated in contemporary venues for black writing such as the Dark Room Collective and the Cave Canem Foundation, including Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, and Carl Phillips. Incorporating a finely honed discussion of the Black Arts Movement, the poetry-jazz fusion of the late 1950s, and slam and spoken word performance milieus such as Def Poetry Jam, she focuses on jazz and hip hop-influenced performance artists including Tracie Morris, Saul Williams, and Jessica Care Moore. Through attention to cadence, rhythm, and structure, The Muse is Music fills a gap in literary scholarship by attending to issues of gender in jazz and poetry and by analyzing recordings of poets both with and without musical accompaniment. Applying the methodology of textual close reading to a critical "close listening" of American poetry's resonant soundscape, Jones's analyses include exploring the formal innovation and queer performance of Langston Hughes's recorded collaboration with jazz musicians, delineating the relationship between punctuation and performance in the post-soul John Coltrane poem, and closely examining jazz improvisation and hip-hop stylization. An elaborate articulation of the connections between jazz, poetry and spoken word, and gender, The Muse Is Music offers valuable criticism of specific texts and performances and a convincing argument about the shape of jazz and African-American poetic performance in the contemporary era.

    In a period just starting to be touched by the allure of consumer culture, in which objects were central to the way gender and social status were experienced but also the subject of a palpable moral outrage, this book argues that material culture has a particularly complex and resonant role to play in Shakespeare's employment of his audience's imagination.Chapters address how props and costumes work within the drama's dense webs of language - how objects are invested with importance and how their worth is constructed through the narratives which surround them. They analyse how Shakespeare constructs rooms on the stage from the interrelation of props, the description of interior spaces and the dynamics between characters, and investigate the different kinds of early modern practices which could be staged - how the materiality of celebration, for instance, brings into play notions of hospitality and reciprocity. Shakespeare and Material Culture ends with a discussion of the way characters create unique languages by talking about things - languages of faerie, of madness, or of comedy - bringing into play objects and spaces which cannot be staged. Exploring things both seen and unseen, this book shows how the sheer variety of material cultures which Shakespeare brings onto the stage can shed fresh light on the relationship between the dynamics of drama and its reception and comprehension.

    Through close readings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Walt Whitman(on aurality), and Herman Melville, William J. Wilson, and a host of genre painters (on visuality), the book reveals how the difficult tasks of representing African Americans-both enslaved and free-in imaginative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy itself.

    A prominent spokesman for agrarian values, Berry frequently defends such practices and ideas as sustainable agriculture, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of work, and the interconnectedness of life. In The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love, Fritz Oehlschlaeg

    Rather than dismiss such assumptions as mere conventions, Melissa Sanchez uncovers the political import of early modern literature's fascination with eroticized violence.Focusing on representations of masochism, sexual assault, and cross-gendered identification, Sanchez re-examines the work of politically active writers from Philip Sidney to John Milton. She argues that political allegiance and consent appear far less conscious and deliberate than traditionalhistorical narratives allow when Sidney depicts abjection as a source of both moral authority and sexual arousal; when Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare make it hard to distinguish between rape and seduction; when Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish depict women who adore treacherous or abusivelovers; when court masques stress the pleasures of enslavement; or when Milton insists that even Edenic marriage is hopelessly pervaded by aggression and self-loathing. Sanchez shows that this literature constitutes an alternate tradition of political theory that acknowledges the irrational andperverse components of power and thereby disrupts more conventional accounts of politics as driven by self-interest, false consciousness, or brute force.Erotic Subjects will be of interest to students and scholars of early modern literary and political history, as well as those interested in the histories of gender, sexuality, and affect more generally.

    Lovecraft lived in the golden age of the pedestrian, and walking was one of the central activities of his life. In the mid 1920s he lived in New York City and went on many long night walks exploring the depths of New York City. This new history book places Lovecraft in the tradition of psychogeography and the history of walking, as well as exploring many other aspects of his life and work in New York. 55,000 words, with a linked table-of-contents, and a fully-linked "round trip" endnotes system. Bibliography. Illustrated.

    Neil Smith a great science fiction novelist? Why is The Daily Mail — easily the best newspaper in England — not fit for wrapping fish and chips? What is the future of the printed book?Sean Gabb deals with these and other issues in this collection of essays. Lively and provocative, they are written for every lover of ancient or modern literature.

    Transcending old boundaries between literary and linguistic studies, this engaging collaborative book comes up with an original array of theoretical approaches and new findings. The chapters in the collection capture a rich diversity of points of view and cover such fields as lexicography, versification, dramaturgy, rhetorical analyses, cognitive and computational corpus-based stylistic studies, offering a holistic vision of Shakespeares uses of language. The perspective is deliberately broad, confronting ideas and visions at the intersection of various techniques of textual investigation. Such novel explorations of Shakespeares multifarious artistry and amazing inventiveness in his use of language will cater for a broad range of readers, from undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars and researchers, to poetry and theatre lovers alike.

    Drawing on archival documents and manuscript sources from Iran and elsewhere, FiroozehKashani-Sabet illustrates how debates over hygiene, reproductive politics, and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries explained demographic trends and put women at the center of nationalist debates. Exploring women's lives under successive regimes, she chronicles the hygiene campaignsthat cast mothers as custodians of a healthy civilization; debates over female education, employment, and political rights; government policies on contraception and population control; and tensions between religion and secularism.

    Rebelling against the notion that his work should relate to some European school of thought, Crane defiantly asserted his freedom to be himself, a true American writer. John T. Irwin, long a passionate and brilliant critic of Crane, gives readers the first major interpretation of the poet’s work in decades.Irwin aims to show that Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge is the best twentieth-century long poem in English. Irwin convincingly argues that, compared to other long poems of the century, The Bridge is the richest and most wide-ranging in its mythic and historical resonances, the most inventive in its combination of literary and visual structures, the most subtle and compelling in its psychological underpinnings. Irwin brings a wealth of new and varied scholarship to bear on his critical reading of the work—from art history to biography to classical literature to philosophy—revealing The Bridge to be the near-perfect synthesis of American myth and history that Crane intended.Irwin contends that the most successful entryway to Crane’s notoriously difficult shorter poems is through a close reading of The Bridge. Having admirably accomplished this, Irwin analyzes Crane’s poems in White Buildings and his last poem, "The Broken Tower," through the larger context of his epic, showing how Crane, in the best of these, worked out the structures and images that were fully developed in The Bridge.Thoughtful, deliberate, and extraordinarily learned, this is the most complete and careful reading of Crane’s poetry available. Hart Crane may have lived in Cleveland, Ohio, but, as Irwin masterfully shows, his poems stand among the greatest written in the English language.

    Now that period of Irish history has closed, this study uncovers how their writing captured that unique historical moment.By showing how Ní Dhuibhne's novels act as considered arguments against attempts to disavow the past, how McCann's protagonists come to terms with their history and how Enright's fiction explores connections and relationships with the female body, Susan Cahill's study pinpoints common concerns for contemporary Irish writers: the relationship between the body, memory and history, between generations, and between past and present.Cahill is able to raise wider questions about Irish culture by looking specifically at how writers engage with the body. In exploring the writers' concern with embodied histories, related questions concerning gender, race, and Irishness are brought to the fore. Such interrogations of corporeality alongside history are imperative, making this a significant contribution to ongoing debates of feminist theory in Irish Studies.

    Dealing with his entire body of work to date, from Less Than Zero to Imperial Bedrooms, the study provides original readings of the writer’s equivocal engagement with American culture. Reading Ellis’s novels in relation to contemporary political, philosophical and aesthetic concerns, Colby recasts him as a social critic and a subversive literary figure who enables us to think differently about the cultural climates of the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

    With it came an unprecedented transformation in the language of religious life. Whereas priests had once acted as mediators between God and men through sacramental rites, Reformed theology declared the priesthood of all believers. What ensued was not the tidy replacement of one doctrine by another but a long and messy conversation about the conventions of religious life and practice. In this brilliant and strikingly original book, Sarah Beckwith traces the fortunes of this conversation in Shakespeare's theater.Beckwith focuses on the sacrament of penance, which in the Middle Ages stood as the very basis of Christian community and human relations. With the elimination of this sacrament, the words of penance and repentance--confess, forgive, absolve --no longer meant (no longer could mean) what they once did. In tracing the changing speech patterns of confession and absolution, both in Shakespeare's work and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture more broadly, Beckwith reveals Shakespeare's profound understanding of the importance of language as the fragile basis of our relations with others. In particular, she shows that the post-tragic plays, especially Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, are explorations of the new regimes and communities of forgiveness. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell, Beckwith enables us to see these plays in an entirely new light, skillfully guiding us through some of the deepest questions that Shakespeare poses to his audiences.

    This volume seeks to examine within a single study all of the biblical laws that are similar in content with ancient Near Eastern laws from Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, and Hatti. The book also examines a small but important group of early rabbinic laws from postbiblical times that exhibit significant similarities with laws found in the ancient Near Eastern collections or "codes." This later group of laws, although absent from the Bible, are nevertheless of comparable antiquity. The presentation focuses on the actual law statements preserved in these ancient law "codes." The discussion then adds narratives, records, and reports of legal actions from ancient sources outside the laws-all of which relate to the formal law statements. The discourse is non-polemical in tone and does not seek to revisit all theories and interpretations. The format allows readers, including those who are new to the subject of biblical law, to engage the primary sources on their own. Endorsements: "This book's intriguing thesis is that there are many 'remainders' of ancient near eastern law that survive in the late antique legal literature of rabbinic Judaism (the Mishnah and the two Talmuds) . . . Greengus uniquely shows how this influence may be discovered in rabbinic legal materials that lack explicit biblical models and antecedents. A fascinating read for all those interested in the history of law and intercultural influences." -Richard S. Sarason Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Thought Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati "Samuel Greengus analyzes an important group of biblical laws with all the legal and linguistic resources discovered in the past century . . . This book will prove indispensable for readers who seek to understand the meaning of biblical laws in their original cultural context and in the course of their ongoing application in postbiblical times." -Jeffrey H. Tigay Emeritus Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures University of Pennsylvania "Greengus presents a comprehensive discussion of biblical law in relation to the entire spectrum of law in the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman world, and Rabbinic Judaism. Written for the general reader as well as the specialist, this volume opens the biblical laws to a broad range of readers from a variety of fields." -Marvin A. Sweeney Claremont Lincoln University and Claremont School of Theology Academy for Jewish Religion California Author Biography: Samuel Greengus is Julian Morgenstern Emeritus Professor of Bible and Near Eastern Literature at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of Old Babylonian Tablets from Ishchali and Vicinity (1979) and Studies in Ishchali Documents (1986).

    In Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England, Miriamne Ara Krummel complicates the notion of the English Middle Ages as a monolithic age of Christian faith.  Cataloguing and explicating the complex depictions of semitisms to be found in medieval literature and material culture, this volume argues that Jews were always present in medieval England, and it is only because of a misreading of the historical record that medieval England has been considered Judenrein—without Jews.

    Exemplary texts describe chaste women who kill their rapists, constant wives who make marriage a debilitating obligation, and devoted mothers who destroy the fitness of children. These cautionary tales draw attention to the more ordinary, necessary choices that take prescribed roles as a mandate for purposeful acts. For early modern narratives, writes Schwarz, intentional compliance poses a complex problem: it sustains crucial tenets of order and continuity but unsettles the hierarchical premises from which those tenets derive. Feminine will appears as a volatile force within heterosociality, lending contingent security to a system that depends less on enforced obedience than on contract and consent.The book begins with an examination of early modern disciplines that treat will as an aspect of the individual psyche, of rhetoric, and of sexual and gendered identities. Drawing on these readings, Schwarz turns to Shakespearean works in which feminine characters articulate and manage the values that define them, revealing the vital force of conventional acts. Her analysis engages with recent research that has challenged the premise of feminine subordination, both by identifying alternative positions and by illuminating resistance within repressive structures. Schwarz builds on this awareness of disparate modes and sites of action in formulating the book's central questions: With what agency, and to what effect, do feminine subjects inhabit the conventions of femininity? In what sense are authenticity and masquerade inseparable aspects of social performance? How might coercive systems produce effective actors? What possibilities emerge from the paradox of prescribed choice? Her conclusions have implications not only for early modern scholarship but also for histories of gender and sexuality, queer studies, and theories of the relationship between subjectivity and ideological constraint.

    In contrast to other recent critics, Ohi asserts that James’s queerness is to be found neither in the homoerotic thematics of the texts, however startlingly explicit, nor in the suggestions of same-sex desire in the author’s biography, however undeniable, but in his style.For Ohi, there are many elements in the style that make James’s writing queer. But if there is a thematic marker, Ohi shows through his careful engagements with these texts, it is belatedness. The recurrent concern with belatedness, Ohi explains, should be understood not psychologically but stylistically, not as confessing the sad predicament of being out of sync with one’s life but as revealing the consequences of style’s refashioning of experience. Belatedness marks life’s encounter with style, and it describes an experience not of deprivation but of the rich potentiality of the literary work that James calls “freedom.” In Ohi’s reading, belatedness is the indicator not of sublimation or repression, nor of authorial self-sacrifice, but of the potentiality of the literary—and hence of the queerness of style.Presenting original readings of a series of late Jamesian texts, the book also represents an exciting possibility for queer theory and literary studies in the future: a renewed attention to literary form and a new sounding—energized by literary questions of style and form—of the theoretical implications of queerness.

    So unusual was this occurrence that the author was believed by some to be someone else, a Spaniard. But it was Tomas Pinpin, later a significant figure in the Spanish printing ministry, who produced this remarkable work.This book seeks to provide an overview of Librong pagaaralan beginning with background material on what is known of Tomas Pinpin. One of the key issues tackled in this book is the reality of a literate Tagalog population at the time of the publishing of Librong pagaaralan. Otherwise, the publishing of Pinpin's work makes no sense. But it was published, and at a time when the Spanish friars were busily engaged in using printing as a means to expand their work also marked the entrance of Tagalogs into the printers since 1593, when Doctrina Christiana was published.Perhaps most significantly, Pinpin's work was one of subversion. For all his expressed desire to help his readers become better Christians, Pinpin was instead seeking to help his fellow Tagalogs, manga capoua co Tagalog (as he wrote it), survive in the marketplace, a world dominated by the Spanish intruders. His goal was Tagalog survival in such a world.Tomas Pinpin's book is a rich resource for social history. It is hoped that this book succeeds in interesting the reader in this remarkable man, his part in Philippine history, and his Librong pagaaralan nang manga Tagalog nang uicang Castila.

    Hardly one of them knows anything about women," and similar observations have been made by critics over time. Yet can Tolkien's portrayal of masculinity truly be reduced to such a simple formula? Are his men all simply "boys" or, as other critics argue, simplistic good heroes, a romanticized version of the medieval knight who fights a dragon to win the princess in the end? In Masculinity in Tolkien, Rost argues that despite Tolkien's often conservative views when it comes to sex and gender, a closer look at how masculinity is performed in his works actually shows the social criticism hidden within, the rejection of the heroic code and the search for a hero and a masculinity which is built on love and loyalty, not the excess of courage and pride that can be found in many of his mythological and literary sources. To do so, Rost looks at Anglo-Saxon literature, and how Tolkien criticizes the heroic code by his portrayal of the costs of pride. Afterward, she explores the concept of Chivalry which Tolkien describes in his essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to show how this chivalrous masculinity is criticized and rejected in Tolkien's fiction. Rost furthermore examines Tolkien's conception of 'good' and 'bad' kingship, and afterward looks at Tolkien's war experiences and how this might have shaped the portrayal of his hobbit characters in The Lord of the Rings. At last, she looks at contemporary, queer readings of Tolkien's portrayal of masculinity which try to deconstruct the conservative heterosexual matrix of his world.

    This book argues that medieval romances provide a central, but under-explored, source for and examples of such authority. By reassessing the influence exerted by female characters, in a spectrum that includes both intellectual and chivalric aid and, in some cases, patronage, it considers how they functioned as models of cultural, intellectual, and social authority in medieval literary texts. In addition to examples set by the family connections, socio-political networks, and textual communities in which they lived, this study argues that women also learned methods of influence from the books they read. In texts like Troilus and Criseyde and Partonope of Blois, the female reader encounters an explicit demonstration of how a womans intellectual and financial resources can be used. The literary representations of women's cultural power expose a continuum of influence from non-material effects to material sway in the medieval patronage system, an influence often unacknowledged in strictly historical and extra-literary sources. Amy N. Vines is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

    During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the marketsystems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate or aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or suresigns of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women's personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century.Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Bront�, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, andChristina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of theireveryday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.

    Because of this widespread fascination, the nerves came to explain the means by which mind and body related to each other. By the 1830s, the nervous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body, and for society, of major historical changes. Literary writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used the nerves as a metaphor to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Representing the 'romance' of the nervous system and its cultural impact thoughtfully and, at times, critically, the fictional experiments of this century helped construct and explore a neurological vision of the body and mind. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.

    Combining breadth of coverage with depth, the book opens with essays on More's family, early life and education, his literary humanism, virtuoso rhetoric, illustrious public career and ferocious opposition to emergent Protestantism, and his fall from power, incarceration, trial and execution. These chapters are followed by in-depth studies of five of More's major works Utopia, The History of King Richard the Third, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and De Tristitia Christi and a final essay on the varied responses to the man and his writings in his own and subsequent centuries. The volume provides an accessible overview of this fascinating figure to students and other interested readers, whilst also presenting, and in many areas extending, the most important modern scholarship on him.

    The Alchemist is his treatise to the world. In it he asserts the importance of following dreams—even in the face of obstacles—and explores the reasons why this pursuit so often becomes complicated, difficult, and fraught with fear and danger.MEET THE AUTHORCharles Limley is a native of Colorado. After earning bachelor’s degrees in both English Literature and Humanities from the University of Colorado—Boulder, he entered the world of professional writing. He began his work with Hyperink during the fall of 2011. In addition to writing, Limley is an avid reader. He also loves bicycles, and has completed several long-distance bicycle tours.EXCERPT FROM THE BOOKThe Alchemist tells the story of a young Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago, as he leaves his flock to go in search of hidden treasure. But in reality, The Alchemist is something much deeper, much larger, and much grander in scope than a simple adventurer’s tale. It is a parable teaching readers the importance of doing whatever is necessary to attain their personal goals. Only by living in this way will each individual fulfill their potential, and contribute to the world in meaningful ways. And when an entire group of people all focus on passionately pursuing their own individual dreams, then greatness becomes possible on a limitless scale.As the novel opens, Santiago herds his sheep to an ancient and abandoned church in the countryside. He anxiously looks forward to his upcoming visit to the merchant who buys his wool, but he’s even more anxious to once again speak with the merchant’s daughter. Ever since meeting her a year ago, Santiago has felt his first inklings of romantic love, and he has started to wonder whether or not she is the woman who can convince him to remain in one place and be content.BOOK OUTLINE+About the Book+About the Author+Synopsis+Key Terms and Definitions+Chapter-By-Chapter Commentary & Summary+Additional Resources

    

    Read it and you'll understand why those-in-the-know scoff at the piles of gold embossed big books piled up in bookstores and opt for the more engaging fare by authors with tricky-to-pronounce names and squiggly lines surrounding their vowels."--Ed NawotkaThe Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading is a collection of occasional essays, a series of meditations on the book industry as it transitions to its electronic future, and a reader on modern publishing. Taken from Open Letter's weblog, Three Percent, The Three Percent Problem examines the publishing industry from a the perspective of a publisher who specializes in bringing international authors to a North American audience.With pieces on ebooks, selling literary books in an increasingly commercial world, and insider views on international book fairs, The Three Percent Problem stands alongside Andre Schiffrin's The Business of Books and Jason Epstein's Book Business as primers on the publishing industry.

    The outcome of the first international conference on David Mitchell's writing, this collection of critical essays focuses on his first three novels - 'Ghostwritten', 'number9dream' and 'Cloud Atlas' - to provide an analysis of Mitchell's complex narrative techniques and the literary, political and cultural implications of his work.

    An essay tracing the global perambulations of the ancient Jewish folktale of King Solomon's ring, engraved with the consolatory yet revitalizing phrase "This, Too, Shall Pass" or "Gam Zeh Yaavor" in Hebrew.

    Equally diverse are the investigative frameworks that have been developed to study such fictional minds, their operations and qualities, and the narrative means used to portray them. The Emergence of Mind provides new perspectives on the strategies used to represent minds in stories and suggests the variety of analytic approaches that illuminate those strategies. In this interdisciplinary and groundbreaking collection of essays, distinguished scholars such as Monika Fludernik, Alan Palmer, and Lisa Zunshine examine trends in the representation of consciousness in English-language narrative discourse from 700 to the present. Tracing commonalities and differences in the portrayal of fictional minds over virtually the entire time span during which narrative discourse in English has been written and read, The Emergence of Mind will have a lasting impact on literary studies, narratology, and other fields.

    In the years leading up to the First World War, the fundamental elements of human nature were thrown into sharp relief by the political tensions that resulted in the ultimate metaphor for the innate destructiveness of humankind: the War itself. If such a war is the true expression of human tendencies, what hope is there for the future? Through the figure of the main character of the novel, Thomas Mann explores the alternative philosophies of life available to human beings in the modern age, and invites the reader to undertake a personal odyssey of discovery, with a view to adopting a positive approach in an era that seems to offer no clear-cut answers. This book is a comprehensive commentary on Thomas Mann's seminal novel, one of the key literary artefacts of the 20th century. The author has taken upon himself the task of explaining all the references and allusions contained in the novel, and of providing readers who know little or no German with enough explanatory comment to enable them to understand the novel and extract the maximum reading pleasure from it.

    R. R. Tolkien's Secondary Universe of elves, dwarves, men and hobbits despite the author's own deep Catholic faith. Tolkien stated that his goal was 'sub-creating' a universe whose natural form of religion would not directly contradict Catholic theology. Essays in Light Beyond All Shadows examine the full sweep of Tolkien's legendarium, not only The Lord of the Rings but also The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-Earth series plus Peter Jackson's film trilogy. Contributions to Light Beyond All Shadows probe both the mind of the maker and the world he made to uncover some of his fictional strategies, such as communicating through imagery. They suggest that Tolkien's Catholic imagination was shaped by the visual appeal of his church's worship and iconography. They seek other influences in St. Ignatius Loyola's meditation technique and St. Philip Neri's 'Mediterranean' style of Catholicism. They propose that Tolkien communicates his story through Biblical typology familiar in the Middle Ages as well as mythic imagery with both Christian and pagan resonances. They defend his 'comedy of grace' from charges of occultism and Manichaean dualism. They analyze Tolkien's Christian friends the Inklings as a supportive literary community. They show that within Tolkien's world, Nature is the Creator's first book of revelation. Like its earlier companion volume, The Ring and the Cross, edited by Paul E. Kerry, scholarship gathered in Light Beyond All Shadows aids appreciation of what is real, meaningful, and truthful in Tolkien's work.

    Examining novels by authors such as Eliza Haywood, Tobias Smollett, and Elizabeth Inchbald, and referencing never-before analyzed case records, Nixon reconstructs the narratives of real orphans in the British parliamentary, equity, and common law courts and compares them to the narratives of fictional orphans. The orphan's uncertain economic, familial, and bodily status creates opportunities to "plot" his or her future according to new ideologies of the social individual. Nixon demonstrates that the orphan encourages both fact and fiction to re-imagine structures of estate (property and inheritance), blood (familial origins and marriage), and body (gender and class mobility). Whereas studies of the orphan typically emphasize the poor urban foundling, Nixon focuses on the orphaned heir or heiress and his or her need to be situated in a domestic space. Arguing that the eighteenth century constructs the "valued" orphan, Nixon shows how the wealthy orphan became associated with new understandings of the individual. New archival research encompassing print and manuscript records from Parliament, Chancery, Exchequer, and King's Bench demonstrate the law's interest in the propertied orphan. The novel uses this figure to question the formulaic structures of narrative sub-genres such as the picaresque and romance and ultimately encourage the hybridization of such plots. As Nixon traces the orphan's contribution to the developing novel and developing ideology of the individual, she shows how the orphan creates factual and fictional understandings of class, family, and gender.

    He was admired by nineteenth-century literary figures such as Poe, Hawthorne, George Lippard (who dedicated his gothic novel Quaker City to him), and John Greenleaf Whittier; identified as an important figure in the development of the American literary tradition by critical heavyweights including R. W. B. Lewis, Richard Chase, Harry Levin, and Leslie Fiedler; and clearly influential to the entire American Gothic tradition. However, it remains true that Brown is seldom read outside of courses on American Romanticism and is more often celebrated for what he initiated than for what he achieved. Here, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock fills this void in the academic and cultural record with an introduction to Brown and his writing that makes the case for Brown as a major author in his own right.

    After introductory chapters on the poet of the Iliad's date and homeland, the poetic traditions known to him, the way in which his work developed, and its early reception, Martin West provides a running commentary on the epic, distinguishing the different stages of the poet's workings, illuminating his aims and methods, and identifying techniques and motifs derived from ancestral Indo-European tradition or imported from the Near East.

    Yet there is surprisingly little scholarly work on the Spirit in the Old Testament. On examination, what we find are similarities but also some significant differences in emphasis from the New Testament. To unpack these emphases on creation, wisdom, prophecy, leadership, creativity and more, the editors of this volume have brought to the task a host of first-rate Old Testament scholars. Together they present a comprehensive examination of the issues facing interpreters and exegetes on the identity and activity of the Spirit in the Hebrew Bible. This volume provides readers with an able guide to the interpretative background of ancient Near Eastern literature, the major themes and motifs, and particular texts and passages that contribute to an understanding of the Spirit in the Old Testament. Contributors include:Andrew AbernethyRichard E. AverbeckDaniel I. BlockRobert B. ChisholmRosalind ClarkeDaniel J. EstesJamie A. GrantRichard S. HessRobert L. HubbardTremper Longman IIIGeert W. LoreinHilary MarlowEugene MerrillErika MooreJohn OswaltRobin RoutledgeWillem VanGemerenJohn WaltonLindsay Wilson

    James Wade provides a counter-reading to theories of the Celtic origins of medieval fairies and suggests ways in which these unusual figures can help us think about the internal logics of medieval romance.

    The Hippocampus, Amygdala, Memory, Amnesia, Long Term Synaptic Potentiation, and Neural Networks -6 neural networks - neural circuits & long term potentiation - neural networks -synaptic growth and dendritic spine proliferation - long term potential & memory - short & long term memory: the anterior & posterior hippocampus - short vs long term verbal & visual memory loss & hippocampal damage - bilateral hippocampal destruction & amnesia - learning and memory in the absence of the hippocampus -the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex - the frontal lobes, hippocampus, & memory -the amygdala, hippocampus & memory - anterograde & post-traumatic/anterograde amnesia - retrograde amnesia - shrinking retrograde amnesia - causes of amnesia - memory gaps - anesthesia & unconscious learning - unconscious knowledge: verbal & source amnesia - the frontal lobes & the dorsal medial thalamus - dorsal medial thalamus, frontal lobes, korsakoff’s syndrome - the hippocampus and dorsal medial nucleus - hippocampus & neocortical arousal - excessive hippocampal arousal & memory loss - the amygdala & emotional neural networks - fear, anxiety, startle, & traumatic stress - fear, anticipation, & repression - fear, emotional trauma, hippocampal deactivation & memory loss - memory loss & amygdala dysfunction - amygdala, hippocampus & dorsal medial nucleus - overview: the hippocampus, amygdala & memory - Part II. Traumatic Stress, Amnesia, Dissociation, Flashbacks, PTSD, Paralytic Fear, Amygdala, Hippocampus, & Recovered Memories -60the neural circuitry of stressthe amygdala and fear fight, flight, and fear paralysis the amygdala-striatum and fear paralysis petrified with fear: catatonia, the amygdala, sma, and striatumtraumatic stress and trance statesdopamine, terror, catatonia, and fear-paralysis, norepinephrine, enkephalins, corticosteroids, and traumatic stressdissociation, fear & out-of-body experiencessex, satan, and alien abductionsstress-induced memory loss and amnesia amnesia for early childhoodfunctional amnesiacorticosteroids, ltp, memory loss, and hippocampal-amygdala injuryopiates, cortisone & hippocampal amnesia the amygdala: emotional learning and hippocampal amnesia the amygdala & traumatic learningserotonin, flashbacks & intrusive imagery kindling, the amygdala, ptsd, & flashback serotonin, cortisol, depression, apathy and stressstress-induced psychosis & personality multiplicityindividual differences and predisposing factorsfalse memoriesPart III Confabulation, False Memories, Delusional Denial, Self-Deception -136self-deceptionconfabulationgap filling, disturbances of time sense and memorydelusional denialconfabulation central featuresthe filling of gaps in information due to disconnectionconfabulation and limited interhemispheric information exchangegap filling and information degradationdelusional denial and left-sided inattention/neglectdisconnectio

    By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.

    The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, showing how notions of sexual coldness and frigidity have been thought about by legal, medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and literary writers.

    This collection, featuring well-known writers, such as Lawrence Hill, Afua Cooper, Christopher Paul Curtis, Natasha Trethewey, Toni Morrison, David Chariandy, Joseph Boyden, and Kwame Dawes. What's a Black Critic to Do II is of especial interest to black readers as well as teachers, librarians, and book clubs. This companion to 2003's What's a Black Critic to Do? constitutes a candid conversation about race in an ostensibly post-racial world.

    Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Gadamer's thought. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Gadamer's writings and detailed synopses of his key works, including his magnum opus, Truth and Method. The Dictionary also includes entries on Gadamer's major philosophical influences, from Plato to Heidegger, and his contemporaries, including Derrida and Habermas. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Gadamer's 'philosophical hermeneutics', offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Gadamer Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying Gadamer or Modern European Philosophy more generally.

    In Europe since medieval times the theatre has been a favoured site for these playful antics. This book, by concentrating upon the functions of folly, is able to make exciting and original connections across periods, genres and frontiers. Whether tricksters, clowns, fools or facilitators, life and art throws up figures whose destiny is to make us laugh but, in the act of laughing, to realize that we are implicated in the follies that maintain the injustices and inequalities of living according to systems that rob us of the possibility of becoming fully human. Playwrights have attempted to depict this illusive quality in every age – Shakespeare's Falstaff, Feste, Lear's Fool; Brecht's Azdak; Fo's Madman; Beckett's double act of Vladimir and Estragon.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    It argues that this character is in direct relation to humans while also situated beyond the boundaries of what is human, familiar, and same, and acts as a supernatural double that defines these boundaries.The book covers a range of topics. The first section illustrates the mythological establishment of elves: the origin of elf belief and the creature's characteristics in the Germanic regions of Europe; its Celtic equivalent; and the development of French Faerie. The central section of the work is devoted to the Elves of J. R. R. Tolkien, who revitalised the human-shaped elf; and the final section examines Tolkien's influence and the current status of the elf in recent narratives and their new-found popularity in modern Fantasy fiction.

    Concentrating on a period of significant social and political change and exploring both canonical and newly rediscovered texts, this book critically assess the changing culture of the late-Victorian period as represented by a range of women writers through a range of essays by leading academics in the field and cutting-edge work by newer scholars.