The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. The Weird and the Eerie both fundamentally concern the outside and the unknown, which are not intrinsically horrifying, even if they are always unsettling. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie. These two modes will be analysed with reference to the work of authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan.

    Much like SparkNotes, in a less clever, more sex-crazed way.The PDF link is defunct, but all content is still available here: https://antigonick.tumblr.com/tagged/...

    The church had become weak, flabby and inconsequential. Being a Christian was more a cultural heritage than a spiritual reality. His mission--reintroduce the Christian faith to Christians. How could he break through to people who were members of the church and thought they were Christians already? Like an Old Testament prophet, Kierkegaard used a variety of pointed and dramatic ways to shake people from their slumber. He incisively diagnosed the spiritual ailments of his age and offered a fresh take on classic Christian teaching. Mark Tietjen thinks that Kierkegaard's critique of his contemporaries strikes close to home today. We also need to listen to one of the most insightful yet complex Christian thinkers of any era. Through an examination of core Christian doctrines--the person of Jesus Christ, human nature, Christian witness and love--Tietjen helps us hear Kierkegaard's missionary message to a church that often fails to follow Christ with purity of heart.

    Presented first as random notes on watching Hitchcock, the fragments soon take up multiple narratives and threads and, like a classic Hitchcock movie, present competing realities. Fragments from a dizzying list of authors, from Truffaut to Philip K. Dick and Geoff Dyer to Bruno Schultz, are meticulously arranged in a fascinating, multilayered reading experience.

    It contains 142 short essays, literary sprints rather than marathons. Subjects range from domestic life to current social trends to an appraisal of contemporary nuttiness.

    It seeks to provoke uniquely strong reactions, such as fear, shock, dread or disgust, and yet remains very popular. Horror is most readily associated with the film industry, but horrific short stories and novels have been wildly loved by readers for well over two centuries. Despite its persistent popularity, until now there has been no up-to-date history of horror fiction for the general reader. This book offers a chronological overview of the genre in fiction and explores its development and mutations over the past 250 years. It also challenges the common misjudgement that horror fiction is necessarily frivolous or dispensable. Leading experts on Gothic and horror literature introduce readers to classics of the genre as well as exciting texts they may not have encountered before. The topics examined include: horror’s roots in the Gothic romance and antebellum American fiction; the penny dreadful and sensation novels of Victorian England; fin-de-siècle ghost stories; decadent fiction and the weird; the familial horrors of the Cold War era; the publishing boom of the 1980s; the establishment of contemporary horror auteurs; and the post-millennial zombie trend.

    Now, in our current age of persistent racial injustice and the renewed spirit of activism represented by the Black Lives Matter movement, Baldwin’s insights are more urgent than ever. Baldwin for Our Times features incisive essay selections from Notes of a Native Son and searing poetry from Jimmy’s Blues—writing to turn to for wisdom and strength as we seek to understand and confront the injustices of our times.

    S. Lewis and the Art of Writing is written for readers interested in C. S. Lewis, the writing life, and in becoming better writers. Lewis stands as one of the most prolific and influential writers in modern history. His life in letters offers writers invaluable encouragement and instruction in the writing craft. In Lewis, writers don't just learn how to write, they also learn something about how to live. This volume explores Lewis's life in, as well as his practice of, writing. From his avid reading life, to his adolescent dreams to be a great poet, through his creative failures, to his brilliant successes, to his constant encouragement of other writers, C. S. Lewis and the Art of Writing celebrates one of the twentieth-century's greatest authors. ""Corey Latta has accomplished a rare feat, penning an engaging and exquisite treatment of C. S. Lewis as a voracious reader and writer's writer. It will be relished and savored by Lewis aficionados, and take readers of every sort on a fascinating guided tour of Lewis's literary adventures with an assortment of disparate scenic stops along the way. A book worthy of the subject, it's a fitting tribute to Lewis, often haunting in its beauty and perspicacity, on occasion downright stirring. It shows the indissoluble link between Lewis's prescient and prodigious writing and his wide reading, features a treasure trove of eminently practical advice for the aspiring writer, and fills readers with a poignant sense of the nobility of the writing vocation."" --David Baggett, author (with Jerry Walls) of Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (2011) and God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (2016). ""Most interpreters attribute C. S. Lewis's literary success to his content, his brilliant insights, and his vivid imagery. But Corey Latta offers a fresh approach, inviting readers to examine Lewis's style--what Lewis learned from his own reading of great authors, what he observed about his own writing process, and what advice he offered to apprentice writers. Latta shows that Lewis's eminence derives as much from his manner of writing as from his matter, how he learned to embody the classical definition of rhetoric, 'a good man speaking well.'"" --David C. Downing, R. W. Schlosser Professor of English, Elizabethtown College; Author of several award-winning books on C. S. Lewis, including Planets in Peril and The Most Reluctant Convert ""C. S. Lewis and the Art of Writing is an enjoyable and instructive treatise on all things writing-related. By uniquely centering the discussion on one of contemporary Christianity's finest writers, clearest thinkers, and staunchest defenders, this handbook guides readers toward writing improvement, encouraging spiritual reflection and edification along the way. With his own lively style and passionate commitment to truth and beauty, Latta serves as both navigator for readers on this educational journey and model of its result."" --Marybeth Baggett, Associate Professor of English, Liberty University; former Associate Editor of Christ and Pop Culture; Associate Editor, MoralApologetics.com ""In this engaging and enlightening volume, Corey Latta shows how C. S. Lewis's reading, writing, and faith formed the man. Whether you come to this study as a writer, a reader, a Lewis aficionado, or merely as a fellow Christian, there is much here to please."" --Karen Swallow Prior, author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me and Fierce Convictions--the Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer Abolitionist Corey Latta is a writer, teacher, and public speaker. He writes on C. S. Lewis, the imagination, apologetics, and literary theology. He is the author of Functioning Fantasies, Election and Unity in Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and When the Eternal Can Be Met.

    

    Tolkien’s narrative theology, synthesizing his Christian worldview with his creative imagination. She illustrates how, within the framework of a theological aesthetics, transcendental beauty is the unifying principle that integrates all aspects of Tolkien’s writing, from pagan despair to Christian joy.   J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christianity is often held in an unsteady tension with the pagan despair of his mythic world.  Some critics portray these as incompatible, while Christian analysis tends to oversimplify the presence of religious symbolism.  This polarity of opinion testifies to the need for a unifying interpretive lens. The fact that Tolkien saw his own writing as “religious” and “Catholic,” yet was preoccupied with pagan mythology, nature, language, and evil, suggests that these areas were wholly integrated with his Christian  worldview.  Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty  examines six structural elements, demonstrating that the author’s Christianity is deeply embedded in the narrative framework of his  creative imagination.

    . . and her uncanny ability to ask difficult questions . . . have endeared her to readers and listeners."—Carol ShieldsEleanor Wachtel is one of the English-speaking world's most respected interviewers. This book, celebrating her show's twenty-five-year anniversary, presents her best conversations from the show, including Jonathan Franzen, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith, W.G. Sebald, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, and nearly a dozen others who share their views on process and the writing life.

    Enigmatic and sometimes hard to decipher, these inscriptions are a distinctive feature of his work. Reading Cy Twombly poses both literary and art historical questions. How does poetic reference in largely abstract works affect their interpretation?Reading Cy Twombly is the first book to focus specifically on the artist's use of poetry. Twombly's library formed an extension of his studio and he sometimes painted with a book open in front of him. Drawing on original research in an archive that includes his paint-stained and annotated books, Mary Jacobus's account--richly illustrated with more than 125 color and black-and-white images--unlocks an important aspect of Twombly's practice.Jacobus shows that poetry was an indispensable source of reference throughout Twombly's career; as he said, he never really separated painting and literature. Among much else, she explores the influence of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson; Twombly's fondness for Greek pastoral poetry and Virgil's Eclogues; the inspiration of the Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses; and Twombly's love of Keats and his collaboration with Octavio Paz.Twombly's art reveals both his distinctive relationship to poetry and his use of quotation to solve formal problems. A modern painter, he belongs in a critical tradition that goes back, by way of Roland Barthes, to Baudelaire. Reading Cy Twombly opens up fascinating new readings of some of the most important paintings and drawings of the twentieth century.

    Lyrical and effusive, they are literary works in themselves. This correspondence has been out of print for decades, and even when it was in print it appeared in scholarly volumes of Melville's complete correspondence, aimed at the academy. The Divine Magnet will provide the general literary public as well as the college classroom with a reliable and beautifully produced volume of Melville's letters to Hawthorne, along with supplemental material, highlighting the relationship between these luminaries of American letters.

    But who is Mister Popo, and why does he look so strange? His ancient cultural origin will finally be revealed! From there we’ll explore Kami’s roots in Japanese Shinto and Chinese Buddhism. You’ll discover how Kami and Pikkoro are related on a spiritual level, how reincarnation works within the Dragon World, and what it means for the new demon king to be the ‘son of the father who was cast down from heaven.’ Afterward, we’ll enter the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai! But will Goku’s friends recognize him, and will he be strong enough to persevere?! Who is this green-skinned man who calls himself “Ma Junia,” and why is he such a grave threat to Goku and the world?! Discover the amazing truth behind these new characters, with surprising mystery’s and reveals from your old friends, as we take a cultural tour through the final volume of the original Dragon Ball manga! It’s a battle of life and death, and Goku’s the only one who can save us!! Volume 6 explores Chapters 162 to 194 of the Dragon Ball manga. It’s time to face god!

    For the journal Wormwood he wrote a series of pieces discussing the leading figures in twentieth-century dark literature, including H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Fritz Leiber and Robert Aickman. They are characterised by his profound insight, high critical standards and his keen allegiance to this fiction. Joel always intended to collect these essays in a book to be entitled This Spectacular Darkness, a quotation from the poet Edwin Morgan, whose work he admired. This cannot be that book: but it brings together all the essays he was able to write in the series. Joel writes in his essay, ‘This Spectacular Darkness’, ‘. . . it was essential to ask new questions about human nature and our place in the world. Horror fiction was . . . an attempt to generate new myths—or a new kind of imagination—that could deal with . . . new realities.’ And few have understood and explored these new myths and realities with the deep understanding that he goes on to demonstrate. Also collected here are essays Joel wrote for other publications, including studies of Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch and Nyarlathotep. The volume is completed by appreciations of Joel’s essays, poetry, short stories and novels.

    Interested in conceptualizing Díaz's decolonial imagination and his radically re-envisioned world, the contributors show how his aesthetic and activist practice reflect a significant shift in American letters toward a hemispheric and planetary culture. They examine the intersections of race, Afro-Latinidad, gender, sexuality, disability, poverty, and power in Díaz's work. Essays in the volume explore issues of narration, language, and humor in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the racialized constructions of gender and sexuality in Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, and the role of the zombie in the short story "Monstro." Collectively, they situate Díaz’s writing in relation to American and Latin American literary practices and reveal the author’s activist investments. The volume concludes with Paula Moya's interview with Díaz.Contributors: Glenda R. Carpio, Arlene Dávila, Lyn Di Iorio, Junot Díaz, Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Ylce Irizarry, Claudia Milian, Julie Avril Minich, Paula M. L. Moya, Sarah Quesada, José David Saldívar, Ramón Saldívar, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Deborah R. Vargas

    Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus’s novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It’s the rare novel that’s as at likely to be found in a teen’s backpack as in a graduate philosophy seminar. If the twentieth century produced a novel that could be called ubiquitous, The Stranger is it.   How did a young man in his twenties who had never written a novel turn out a masterpiece that still grips readers more than seventy years later? With Looking for “The Stranger”, Alice Kaplan tells that story. In the process, she reveals Camus’s achievement to have been even more impressive—and more unlikely—than even his most devoted readers knew.   Born in poverty in colonial Algeria, Camus started out as a journalist covering the criminal courts. The murder trials he attended, Kaplan shows, would be a major influence on the development and themes of The Stranger. She follows Camus to France, and, making deft use of his diaries and letters, re-creates his lonely struggle with the novel in Montmartre, where he finally hit upon the unforgettable first-person voice that enabled him to break through and complete The Stranger.   Even then, the book’s publication was far from certain. France was straining under German occupation, Camus’s closest mentor was unsure of the book’s merit, and Camus himself was suffering from near-fatal tuberculosis. Yet the book did appear, thanks in part to a resourceful publisher, Gaston Gallimard, who was undeterred by paper shortages and Nazi censorship.     The initial critical reception of The Stranger was mixed, and it wasn’t until after liberation that The Stranger began its meteoric rise. As France and the rest of the world began to move out of the shadow of war, Kaplan shows, Camus’s book— with the help of an aggressive marketing campaign by Knopf for their 1946 publication of the first English translation—became a critical and commercial success, and Camus found himself one of the most famous writers in the world. Suddenly, his seemingly modest tale of alienation was being seen for what it really was: a powerful parable of the absurd, an existentialist masterpiece.   Few books inspire devotion and excitement the way The Stranger does. And it couldn’t have a better biographer than Alice Kaplan, whose books about twentieth-century French culture and history have won her legions of fans. No reader of Camus will want to miss this brilliant exploration.

    For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler’s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories—an “Austro-Modernism” that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography.Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus’s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti’s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notebooks and Paul Celan’s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of  Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.

    Exploring the genre's key themes, international impact and socio-political contexts, Scandinavian Crime Fiction guides readers through such key texts as Sjöwall and Wahlöö's Novel of a Crime, Gunnar Staalesen's Varg Veum series, Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, Henning Mankell's Wallander books, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and TV series such as The Killing. With its focus on the function of crime fiction in both reflecting and shaping the late-modern Scandinavian welfare societies, this book is essential for readers, viewers and fans of contemporary crime writing.

    

    The category of the literary has always been contentious. What is clear, however, ishow increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognized as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greaterpressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work intothe meaning and value of literary reading.This short but thought-provoking volume asks the question, What is it that tragedy makes us know? The focus is on tragedy as a mode of representing the experience of radical suffering, pain, or loss, a mode of narrative through which we come to know certain things about ourselves and ourworld--about its fragility and ours. Through a mixture of historical discussion and close reading of a number of dramatic texts--from Sophocles to Sarah Kane--the book addresses a wide range of debates: how tragedy is defined, whether there is such a thing as absolute tragedy, various modernattempts to rework the classical heritage and the relation of comedy to tragedy. There is also a fresh discussion of whether religious--particularly Christian--discourse is inimical to the tragic and of the necessary tension between tragic narrative and certain kinds of political as well asreligious rhetoric. Rowan Williams argues that tragic drama both articulates failure and frailty and, in affirming the possibility of narrating the story of traumatic loss, refuses to settle for passivity, resignation, or despair. In this sense, it still shows the trace of its ritual and religiousroots. And in challenging two-dimensional models of society, power, humanity and human knowing, it remains an intrinsic part of any fully humanist culture.

    But like many New York intellectuals, the essay was his characteristic form, accommodating his multifarious interests and expressing his protean, searching exuberant mind. This collection includes early essays from and on the radical 60s, on New York City, on literary figures from Kafka to Pamuk, and late essays on rock, hip hop, and gentrification. Concluding with his last essay, completed just before his death in 2013, this book is Berman s intellectual autobiography, tracing his career as a thinker through the way he read the signs in the street. "

    Why, then, have contemporary poets turned with such intensity to documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane? Drawing on insights about the nature of everyday life fromphilosophy, history, and critical theory, Andrew Epstein traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period as a reaction to the rapid, unsettlingtransformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction. Epstein demonstrates that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even a mode of resistance, to a culture suffering from an acute crisis of attention.In this timely and engaging study, Epstein examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism and why it has so often sparked genre-bending formal experimentation. With chapters devoted to illuminating readings of a diverse group ofwriters--including poets associated with influential movements like the New York School, language poetry, and conceptual writing--the book considers the variety of forms contemporary poetry of everyday life has taken, and analyzes how gender, race, and political forces all profoundly inflect theexperience and the representation of the quotidian.By exploring the rise of experimental realism as a poetic mode and the turn to rule-governed everyday-life projects, Attention Equals Life offers a new way of understanding a vital strain at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It not only charts the evolution of asignificant concept in cultural theory and poetry, but also reminds readers that the quest to pay attention to the everyday within today's frenetic world of and social media is an urgent and unending task.

    Its student-centered rhetorical approach and pedagogical features--including an engaging image program, prompts for activism, a comprehensive glossary, appendices of key terms, annotated bibliographies for additional reading, and Feminisms in Brief--aid students in assimilating fundamental women's and gender studies terms and concepts. While it is a textbook and not an anthology, Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies adopts the best facets of the anthology approach: it includes discussions of frequently anthologized writers and writing that is more engaging and narrative in style than traditional textbooks. The book systematically covers core interdisciplinary concepts so that students are prepared for women's and gender studies courses in a variety of disciplines.

    Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo work to historicize why it is that certain works or creators have come to define the notion of a "quality comic book," while other works and creators have been left at the fringes of critical analysis.

    The first part explains why Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson came to see style as central to political criticism. It delineates the historical and conceptual preconditions for the emergence of a politics of style, and uncovers an underground current of stylistics within the Marxist tradition from Marx to Barthes. The second part sets out precisely what each thinker has written on style and demonstrates how this came to figure in their overall intellectual and political projects, focusing above all on a detailed reconstruction of Williams s best-known concept, the structure of feeling . Finally, the third part sets out an independent theory of style and makes an ambitious attempt to establish it as a foundational element of a new Marxist poetics."

    Similar to Joshua and Judges, neither Ruth nor Esther shows any familiarity with the laws in the Five Books of Moses. Remarkably, Judith contains more religious expressions than either Ruth or Esther. Why, then, did the rabbis exclude it from the Bible? After a detailed analysis of the story, this book offers an answer to this age-old question. The volume contains a plethora of unexpected and thought-provoking facts, such as:Although many rabbis suggest that Ruth converted to Judaism, the story stresses repeatedly even at the end that Ruth is a Moabite. No mention is made that she converted. Indeed, the practice of conversion most likely did not exist prior to 125 BCE.Mordecai is the hero of Purim. It is he, not Esther, whom the book praises in its conclusion. According to II Maccabees 15:36, Adar 14 was called the Day of Mordecai.Both Esther's and Mordecai's names, although considered Jewish names today, are Persian names most likely based on the idols Ishtar and Marduk.In the book of Judith, the Judeans prayerfully wait for God to save them from the Assyrian siege. In contrast, Judith devises a plan to kill the general and save her people.

    It demonstrates how the hand and its activities are described and embedded in Shakespeare's texts and about its role on the Shakespearean stage: as part of the actor's body, in the language as metaphor, and as a morbid stage-prop. Understanding the cultural signifiers that lie behind the early modern understanding of the hand and gesture, opens up new and sometimes disturbing ways of reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays.

    The breakthrough first volume, The Next American Essay, highlighted major work from 1974 to 2003, while the second, The Lost Origins of the Essay, showcased the essay's ancient and international forebears. Now, with The Making of the American Essay, D'Agata concludes his monumental tour of this inexhaustible form, with selections ranging from Anne Bradstreet's secular prayers to Washington Irving's satires, Emily Dickinson's love letters to Kenneth Goldsmith's catalogues, Gertrude Stein's portraits to James Baldwin's and Norman Mailer's meditations on boxing.Across the anthologies, D'Agata's introductions to each selection-intimate and brilliantly provocative throughout-serve as an extended treatise, collectively forming the backbone of the trilogy. He uncovers new stories in the American essay's past, and shows us that some of the most fiercely daring writers in the American literary canon have turned to the essay in order to produce our culture's most exhilarating art.The Making of the American Essay offers the essay at its most varied, unique, and imaginative best, proving that the impulse to make essays in America is as old and as original as the nation itself.

    E. Housman and the influence of his particular brand of Englishness“He is a strange phenomenon,” Ted Hughes wrote of A. E. Housman, “but to my mind the most perfect expression of a whole mood of English history—a true master.” Housman—classical scholar and poet—is best known for the collection A Shropshire Lad. When the book was published in 1896, it made little impact, but it has since become one of the best-loved volumes of poetry in the English language. An evocation of English character and countryside, A Shropshire Lad remains as potent today as it was more than a century ago.Housman Country is an account of the life and times of A Shropshire Lad. In this absorbing volume, Peter Parker investigates the particular English sensibility that imbues Housman’s verse. A believer in the power of poetry to both provide pleasure and harmonize grief, Housman was a romantic—though a romantic of a doom-laden English variety. Deftly intertwining literary analysis, biography, and cultural history, Parker shows that these poems were not only far-reaching—carried into battle by World War I soldiers and set to music by twentieth-century composers—but also deeply communal, shaping notions of English national identity.Mapping out a terrain that is as literary as it is historical, Parker animates the fascinating personality of a man who produced one of England’s most influential works of literature.

    Intended for academic and general readers alike, this insightful collection of essays takes a contrarian attitude toward current orthodoxies--its assessment of the flawed strategies used by prominent critics is especially revealing--and offers a critical philosophy that reaffirms the value not just of criticism but of literature itself.

    Then we’ll join them as they fight in a life or death battle against the Demon King Pikkoro! Akira Toriyama starts us off by introducing three new characters into the story. These are Tenshinhan, Chaozu, and their evil master, Tsuru-sennin. This book reveals each of their cultural backgrounds. That’s right, if you’ve ever said to yourself, “Why does Tenshinhan have a third eye?” and, “What the heck is Chaozu?!” then this is the book you’ve been waiting for. Toriyama then takes the Dragon Ball story to new depths by adding demons and gods into the mix. He increases the intensity of the series and makes it so Goku has no choice but to train harder in order to enact his revenge. And the way Goku does it is straight out of secret Daoist meditation practices of ancient China. Inside these pages you’ll discover the true origin of the demon king, find out how Goku learns to sense the energy of his opponents, and understand the full power of the world famous senzu. This book contains hundreds of new revelations about your favorite characters and their adventures through the Dragon World. Volume 5 explores Chapters 113 to 161. It's time to face your demons!

    They portray blind, lame, maimed creatures cracking whips and wielding can openers who are funny when they should be chilling, cruel when they should be tender, warm when most wounded. His works seem less to conclude than to stop dead. And so readers quite naturally ask: what might all this be meant to mean?In a lively and enlivening study of a singular creative nature, Leland de la Durantaye helps us better understand Beckett's strangeness and the notorious difficulties it presents. He argues that Beckett's lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose--not to denigrate himself, or his audience, nor even to reconnect with the child or the savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future. Whether called "creative willed mismaking," "logoclasm," or "word-storming in the name of beauty," Beckett meant by these terms an art that attacks language and reason, unity and continuity, art and life, with wit and venom.Beckett's Art of Mismaking explains Beckett's views on language, the relation between work and world, and the interactions between stage and page, as well as the motives guiding his sixty-year-long career--his strange decision to adopt French as his literary language, swerve from the complex novels to the minimalist plays, determination to "fail better," and principled refusal to follow any easy path to originality.

    It is a book that aims at getting the reader past teleological interpretations and questions, letting the reader in on new ways of doing criticism as well as new ways of going, being, and thinking.

    It gives a nuanced picture of delusion as a repair of language itself, following Freud and Lacan in historic and contemporary forms of psychotic art, writing and speech.

    But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passion, excitement, and compromises the act provokes.Meisel builds a rough history from major social, psychological, and cosmological turning points in the imagining of chaos. He uses examples from literature, philosophy, painting, graphic art, science, linguistics, music, and film, particularly exploring the remarkable shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from conceiving of chaos as disruptive to celebrating its liberating and energizing potential. Discussions of Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, Calderon, Milton, Haydn, Blake, Faraday, Chekhov, Faulkner, Wells, and Beckett, among others, are matched with incisive readings of art by Brueghel, Rubens, Goya, Turner, Dix, Dada, and the futurists. Meisel addresses the revolution in mapping energy and entropy and the manifold effect of thermodynamics. He then uses this chaotic frame to elaborate on purpose, mortality, meaning, and mind.

    The past few decades have seen an expansion of interest in surrealist writers, whose contribution to the history of ideas in the twentieth-century is only now being recognised. Surrealism: Key Concepts is the first book in English to present an overview of surrealism through the central ideas motivating the popular movement. An international team of contributors provide an accessible examination of the key concepts, emphasising their relevance to current debates in social and cultural theory. This book will be an invaluable guide for students studying a range of disciplines, including Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies, and anyone who wishes to engage critically with surrealism for the first time. Contributors: Dawn Ades, Joyce Cheng, Jonathan P. Eburne, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Guy Girard, Raihan Kadri, Michael Löwy, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Michael Richardson, Donna Roberts, Bertrand Schmitt, Georges Sebbag, Raymond Spiteri, and Michael Stone-Richards.

    By rereading canonical and ignored texts while pushing the boundaries of ecocritical theory and practice, Weidner provides a fresh perspective on Burroughs and suggests new theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the work of other Beat writers. Using an ecocritical lens, Weidner explores the toxicity in Naked Lunch while at the same time teasing out latent ecological questions embedded in Burroughs’ later works. The author’s analysis of unknown and miniature “cut-ups,” texts that have been disassembled and rearranged to create new passages, provides a novel understanding of these cryptic forms. Weidner also examines in detail books by Burroughs that have been virtually ignored by critics, exposing the deep ecology of the Beat writer’s vision.  In calling attention to Burroughs’s narrative strategies that link him to an environmental political position, The Green Ghost demonstrates that the work of the Beat writer is a ripe source for ecocritical dialogue.

    But what do Southern and Gothic mean, and how are they related? Traditionally seen as drawing on the tragedy of slavery and loss, Southern Gothic is now a richer, more complex subject. Thirty-five distinguished scholars explore the Southern Gothic, under the categories of Poe and his Legacy; Space and Place; Race; Gender and Sexuality; and Monsters and Voodoo. The essays examine slavery and the laws that supported it, and stories of slaves who rebelled and those who escaped. Also present are the often-neglected issues of the Native American presence in the South, socioeconomic class, the distinctions among the several regions of the South, same-sex relationships, and norms of gendered behaviour. This handbook covers not only iconic figures of Southern literature but also other less well-known writers, and examines gothic imagery in film and in contemporary television programmes such as True Blood and True Detective."

    Questions and assignments for each selection provide a range of activities for students, while the website for the Spotlight Series offers comprehensive instructor support with sample syllabi and additional teaching resources. The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series is an exciting line of single-theme readers, each featuring Bedford’s trademark care and quality. An Editorial Board of more than a dozen compositionists at schools focusing on specific themes assists in the development of the series. The readers in the series collect thoughtfully chosen readings sufficient for an entire writing course—about 35 selections—to allow instructors to provide carefully developed, high-quality instruction at an affordable price. Bedford Spotlight Readers are designed to help students make inquiries from multiple perspectives, opening up topics such as monsters, borders, subcultures, happiness, money, food, sustainability, and gender to critical analysis. The readers are flexibly arranged in thematic chapters, each focusing in depth on a different facet of the central topic.

    Agatha Christie was the most commercially successful novelist of the twentieth century, and her fiction remains popular. She created such memorable characters as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and has become synonymous with a nostalgic, conservative tradition of crime fiction. J.C. Bernthal reads Christie through the lens of queer theory, uncovering a playful, alert, and subversive social commentary. After considering Christie s emergence in a commercial market hostile to her sex, in Queering Agatha Christie Bernthal explores homophobic stereotypes, gender performativity, queer children, and masquerade in key texts published between 1920 and 1952. Christie engaged with debates around human identity in a unique historical period affected by two world wars. The final chapter considers twenty-first century Poirot and Marple adaptations, with visible LGBT characters, and poses the question: might the books be queerer?"

    Douglas LeMaster explains why the stakes are so high in this detailed, academic work. Democracy, he says, is the only form of social organization that is not exploitive by design. To prove his point, he examines how human history has been dominated by monopolies, such as the priestly monopolies of the great religions, the land monopolies of kings and aristocracies, the marketplace monopolies of capitalists, and most recently-a reinvented and secular information monopoly. While this latest monopoly is still in its formative stage, it's founded on corporate control of expressive rights, copyright, and patent-and it should concern all of us. Join LeMaster as he takes a close look at the latest form of an insidious disease and reveals how these latest

    Low's guiding principle is the assumption that space emerges in the interplay between objects, structures and actions. Based on a critical discussion of classic theories of space, Low develops a new dynamic theory of space that accounts for the relational context in which space is constituted. This innovative view on the interdependency of material, social, and symbolic dimensions of space also permits a new perspective on architecture and urban development.

    Adam Miller explores how Wallace's work masterfully investigates the nature of first-world boredom and shows, in the process, how easy it is to get addicted to distraction (chemical, electronic, or otherwise). Implicitly critiquing, excising, and repurposing elements of AA's Twelve Step program, Wallace suggests that the practice of prayer (regardless of belief in God), the patient application of attention to things that seem ordinary and boring, and the internalization of clichés may be the antidote to much of what ails us in the 21st century.

    Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work.Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.

    Based on the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which also appears in the Qur’an, the play tells the story of three Christian men and a dog who awaken in a cave after fleeing from persecution by their pagan king. Upon venturing out, the men discover that three hundred years have passed, and must come to terms with a transformed world. Though hailed in literary circles as a landmark in Egyptian drama, the play flopped with audiences, some of whom fell asleep. Published as part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations issue, Subin’s essay examines The People of the Cave and the myth that inspired it, tracing the origins and incarnations of the sleepers, a story told and retold at moments of political awakening, from postrevolutionary America to contemporary Egypt. Not Dead But Sleeping considers the myth’s speculative uses and revolutionary potential, poetically pushing back against Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous dictum, “There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.” Anna Della Subin writes for publications such as the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and the White Review, among others. She is a contributing editor at Bidoun.

    Impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space are not only common in today’s world of postmodernist literature but can also be found throughout the history of literature. Examples include the beast fable, the heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction novel, among others.Unnatural Narrative looks at the startling and persistent presence of the impossible or “the unnatural” throughout British and American literary history. Layering the lenses of cognitive narratology, frame theory, and possible-worlds theory, Unnatural Narrative offers a rigorous and engaging new characterization of the unnatural and what it yields for individual readers as well as literary culture. Jan Alber demonstrates compelling interpretations of the unnatural in literature and shows the ways in which such unnatural phenomena become conventional in readers’ minds, altogether expanding our sense of the imaginable and informing new structures and genres of narrative engagement.

    His novel The Sound and the Fury is frequently cited as one of the best books of all time, and all of his works powerfully explore complex societal and family issues that continue to be relevant in our own day. Yet, because of his decidedly difficult, stream-of-consciousness style, Faulkner’s books remain sadly unknown to many readers. In Simply Faulkner, author Philip Weinstein not only helps us understand these challenging works, but also explains why Faulkner had to write them as he did, in an effort to capture the sheer abundance and unruliness of life. Further, in his exploration of the author’s own colorful life—including decades of working for a film industry he despised—Weinstein reveals a fascinating connection between Faulkner’s troubled personal biography and his groundbreaking fiction. The goal of Simply Faulkner is not to simplify the author, but, rather, to create a framework that allows us to comprehend him in his own idiosyncratic way. It strives to show us the real Faulkner—warts and complications and all—and to demonstrate why his brilliant masterpieces still speak to us in a deeply meaningful way.

    Old fans who read the original magazines, and new fans who enjoy the pulp reprints, now have access to detailed reviews of every single story. This book contains insights which can only come from reading the entire series.+ Reviews of all 325 pulp magazine stories.+ Bonus review of the "lost"Shadow novel.+ Bonus review of Walther B. Gibson's final "official" Shadow story+ Bonus review of the 1994 movie.+ Bonus review of the 1940 movie serial+ Complete list of Shadow novels, ranked by favorite

    

    Their arguments range from the playful to the academic, and are as varied as the authors themselves. As editor Christopher Redmond says, "What they have written is compelling evidence that any one of the Sherlock Holmes stories can be the best; it’s all a matter of what the reader is looking for." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales range from Victorian horror, to jewel heists, to society scandals. As these authors show, there's a Sherlock Holmes adventure for every taste. This volume benefits the Beacon Society. No royalties from the sale of this volume will be paid to either the authors or the editor. Royalties earned will, with the cooperation of the publisher, be turned over in their entirety to the Beacon Society, a not-for-profit organization of Sherlockians with the purpose of introducing young people to Sherlock Holmes through classrooms and libraries.

    Theoretically informed but accessibly written, this volume relates Frankenstein to various social, literary, scientific and historical contexts, and outlines how critical theories such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, and queer theory generate new and important discussion in illuminating ways. The volume also explores the cultural afterlife of the novel including its adaptations in various media such as drama, film, television, graphic novels, and literature aimed at children and young adults. Written by an international team of leading experts, the essays provide new insights into the novel and the various critical approaches which can be applied to it. The volume is an essential guide to students and academics who are interested in Frankenstein and who wish to know more about its complex literary history.

    Yet, Denis Feeney boldly argues, the beginnings of Latin literature were anything but inevitable. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history.Beyond Greek traces the emergence of Latin literature from 240 to 140 BCE, beginning with Roman stage productions of plays that represented the first translations of Greek literary texts into another language. From a modern perspective, translating foreign-language literature into the vernacular seems perfectly normal. But in an ancient Mediterranean world made up of many multilingual societies with no equivalent to the text-based literature of the Greeks, literary translation was unusual if not unprecedented. Feeney shows how it allowed Romans to systematically take over Greek forms of tragedy, comedy, and epic, making them their own and giving birth to what has become known as Latin literature.The growth of Latin literature coincides with a period of dramatic change in Roman society. The powerful but geographically confined Roman city-state of 320 BCE had conquered all of Italy just fifty years later. By the time Rome became the unquestioned dominant power in the Mediterranean over the course of the next century, its citizens could boast of having a distinct vernacular literature, as well as a historical tradition and mythology, that put them in a unique relationship with Greek culture.

    The essays are structured around critical terms pertinent both to the field and to modern life in general.The nonbinary, nontraditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refutes standard binary thinking--First World/Third World, self/other, for instance--that postcolonial studies revealed as a flawed rhetorical structure for analyzing empire. Instead, Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that begins with southern studies but extends beyond.

    Paired with Joseph’s rich descriptions of person and place, this collection of candid interviews brings together some of the best Australian authors, covering everything from traumatic wartime journalism and burning national issues to Middle Eastern spices. In this definitive work, eleven influential authors explore their writing process, ethical dilemmas and connection to the capacious genre. As the first collection of its kind, this work brings Australian creative nonfiction into the literary spotlight.

    Fora long time, scholars tended to conceptualize Greek religion as one in which belief did not matter, and religiosity had to do with observance of rituals and religious practices, rather than with worshipers' inner investment. But what does it mean when Greek texts time and again speak of purity ofmind, soul, and thoughts?This book takes a radical new look at the Ancient Greek notions of purity and pollution. Its main concern is the inner state of the individual worshipper as they approach the gods and interact with the divine realm in a ritual context. It is a book about Greek worshippers' inner attitudes towardsthe gods and rituals, and about what kind of inner attitude the Greek gods were envisaged to expect from their worshippers. In the wider sense, it is a book about the role of belief in ancient Greek religion. By exploring the Greek notions of inner purity and pollution from Hesiod to Plato, thesignificance of intrinsic, faith-based elements in Greek religious practices is revealed--thus providing the first history of the concepts of inner purity and pollution in early Greek religion.

    In early modern England, such binding language waseverywhere. Oaths of office, marriage vows, legal bonds, and casual, everyday profanity gave shape and texture to life. The proper use of such language, and the extent of its power to bind, was argued over by lawyers, religious writers, and satirists, and these debates inform literature and drama.Shakespeare's Binding Language gives a freshly researched account of these contexts, but it is focused on Shakespeare's plays. What motives should we look for when characters asseverate or promise? How far is binding language self-persuasive or deceptive? When is it allowable to break a vow? How dooaths and promises structure an audience's expectations? Across the sweep of Shakespeare's career, from the early histories to the late romances, this book opens new perspectives on key dramatic moments and illuminates language and action. Each chapter gives an account of a play or group of plays, yet the study builds to a sustained investigation of some of the most important systems, institutions, and controversies in early modern England, and of the wiring of Shakespearean dramaturgy.Scholarly but accessible, and offering startling insights, this is a major contribution to Shakespeare studies by one of the leading figures in the field.

    Filipino Studies is a field-defining collection of vibrant voices, critical perspectives, and provocative ideas about the cultural, political, and economic state of the Philippines and its diaspora. Traversing issues of colonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, and nationalism, this volume examines not only the past and present position of the Philippines and its people, but also advances new frameworks for re-conceptualizing this growing field.Written by a prestigious lineup of international scholars grappling with the legacies of colonialism and imperial power, the essays examine both the genealogy of the Philippines' hyphenated identity as well as the future trajectory of the field. Hailing from multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the contributors revisit and contest traditional renditions of Philippine colonial histories, from racial formations and the Japanese occupation to the Cold War and "independence" from the United States. Whether addressing the contested memories of World War II, the "voyage" of Filipino men and women into the U.S. metropole, or migrant labor and the notion of home, the assembled essays tease out the links between the past and present, with a hopeful longing for various futures. Filipino Studies makes bold declarations about the productive frameworks that open up new archives and innovative landscapes of knowledge for Filipino and Filipino American Studies.

    Day, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore, Anna Katrina Gutierrez, Adrienne Kertzer, Kouen Kim, Alexandra Kotanko, Jennifer Mitchell, Mary Jeanette Moran, Julie Pfeiffer, and Donelle RuweLiving or dead, present or absent, sadly dysfunctional or merrily adequate, the figure of the mother bears enormous freight across a child's emotional and intellectual life. Given the vital role literary mothers play in books for young readers, it is remarkable how little scholarly attention has been paid to the representation of mothers outside of fairy tales and beyond studies of gender stereotypes. This collection of thirteen essays begins to fill a critical gap by bringing together a range of theoretical perspectives by a rich mix of senior scholars and new voices.Following an introduction in which the coeditors describe key trends in interdisciplinary scholarship, the book's first section focuses on the pedagogical roots of maternal influence in early children's literature. The next section explores the shifting cultural perspectives and subjectivities of the twentieth century. The third section examines the interplay of fantasy, reality, and the ethical dimensions of literary mothers. The collection ends with readings of postfeminist motherhood, from contemporary realism to dystopian fantasy.The range of critical approaches in this volume will provide multiple inroads for scholars to investigate richer readings of mothers in children's and young adult literature.

    Cast as a long, impassioned conversation with God, it is intertwined with passages of life-narrative and with key theological and philosophical insights. It is enduringly popular, and justly so."The Routledge Guidebook to Augustine s Confessions" is an engaging introduction to this spiritually creative and intellectually original work. This guidebook is organized by themes:the importance of languagecreation and the sensible worldmemory, time and the selfthe afterlife of the Confessions.Written for readers approaching the "Confessions" for the first time, this guidebook addresses the literary, philosophical, historical and theological complexities of the work in a clear and accessible way. Excerpts in both Latin and English from this seminal work are included throughout the book to provide a close examination of both the autobiographical and theoretical content within the "Confessions.""

    The popular novel spawned an 1899 stage adaptation, reaching audiences of over 10 million, and two highly successful film adaptations. For over a century, it has become a ubiquitous pop cultural presence, representing a deeply powerful story and monumental experience for some and a defining work of bad taste and false piety for others. The first and only collection of essays on this pivotal cultural icon, Bigger Than "Ben-Hur" addresses Lew Wallace's beloved classic to explore its polarizing effect and to expand the contexts within which it can be studied. In the essays gathered here, scholars approach Ben-Hur from multiple directions- religious and secular, literary, theatrical, and cinematic-to understand not just one story in varied formats but also what they term the "Ben-Hur tradition." Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, contributions include the rise of the Protestant novel in the United States; relationships between and among religion, spectacle, and consumerism; the "New Woman" in early Hollywood; and a "wish list" for future adaptations, among others. Together, these essays explore how this remarkably fluid story of faith, love, and revenge has remained relevant to audiences across the globe for over 130 years.

    Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes wide-ranging essays that illuminate the legacy of American women poets. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse of such diverse poets as Edna St Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of feminist literary criticism. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of women's poetry in America and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

    In so doing, we structure the book around geographical coordinates (from North to South) and move between various national traditions of the gothic (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, etc) alongside regional manifestations of the Gothic (the US south and the Caribbean) as well as transnational movements of the Gothic within the Americas. The reflections on national traditions of the Gothic in this volume add to the critical body of literature on specific languages or particular nations, such as Scottish Gothic, American Gothic, Canadian Gothic, German Gothic, Kiwi Gothic, etc. This is significant because, while the Southern Gothic in the US has been thoroughly explored, there is a gap in the critical literature about the Gothic in the larger context of region of 'the South' in the Americas. This volume does not pretend to be a comprehensive examination of tropical Gothic in the Americas; rather, it pinpoints a variety of locations where this form of the Gothic emerges. In so doing, the transnational interventions of the Gothic in this book read the flows of Gothic forms across borders and geographical regions to tease out the complexities of Gothic cultural production within cultural and linguistic translations. Tropical Gothic includes, but is by no means limited to, a reflection on a region where European colonial powers fought intensively against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources.　In other cases, the vast populations of African slaves were transported, endowing these regions with a cultural inheritance that all the nations involved are still trying to comprehend. The volume reflects on how these histories influence the Gothic in this region.

    This 15-hour free course considered some of the different ways of reading Great Expectations, based on the type of genre to which the book belongs.

    What if today's "critical posthumanisms," even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if "the human" is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny "contemporary"--and ally--of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism.

    G. Farrell • Laura Freeman remembers the romance Elizabeth David preferred to forget • Gary Mead seeks a cure for depression • Alexandra Harris watches the making of a Shropshire garden .

    S. Lewis was memorialized in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, taking his place beside the greatest names in English literature. Oxford and Cambridge Universities, where Lewis taught, also held commemorations. This volume gathers together addresses from those events. Rowan Williams and Alister McGrath assess Lewis's legacy in theology, Malcolm Guite addresses his integration of reason and imagination, William Lane Craig takes a philosophical perspective, while Lewis's successor as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, Helen Cooper, considers him as a critic. The collection also includes more personal and creative responses: Walter Hooper, Lewis biographer, recalls their first meeting; there are poems, essays, a panel discussion, and even a report by the famous ""Mystery Worshipper"" from the Ship of Fools website, along with a moving reflection by royal wedding composer Paul Mealor about how he set one of Lewis's poems to music. Containing theology, literary criticism, poetry, memoir, and much else besides, this volume reflects the breadth of Lewis's interests and the astonishing variety of his own output: a diverse and colorful commemoration of an extraordinary man. ""Formidably learned and capable of dazzling eloquence, C. S. Lewis was one of the towering intellects of the twentieth century. Interest in his work and achievements persists unabated. The lucid power and luminous imagination of the mind of Lewis, moreover, is most admirably illustrated in this fine collection of essays by a distinguished and distinctive group of scholars."" --Douglas Hedley, Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge; author, The Iconic Imagination ""This unique and essential volume provides a fitting tribute to C. S. Lewis on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, including the actual proceedings of the historic event at Westminster Abbey, as well as suitably wide-ranging engagements with his remarkable achievements as scholar, theologian, apologist, poet, and imaginative writer."" --Robert MacSwain, Associate Professor of Theology, Sewanee: The University of the South; coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis Michael Ward is a Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, Texas. He is author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (2008). Peter S. Williams is Assistant Professor in Communication and Worldviews at Gimlekollen College, NLA University, Norway. His books include C. S. Lewis vs. the New Atheists (2013) and A Faithful Guide to Philosophy (2013).

    Few consider, however, that Carroll conceived his Alice books during the 1860s, a moment of intense intellectual upheaval, as new scientific, linguistic, educational, and mathematical ideas flourished around him and far beyond. Alice in Space reveals the contexts within which the Alice books first lived, bringing back the zest to jokes lost over time and poignancy to hidden references. Gillian Beer explores Carroll’s work through the speculative gaze of Alice, for whom no authority is unquestioned and everything can speak. Parody and Punch, evolutionary debates, philosophical dialogues, educational works for children, math and logic, manners and rituals, dream theory and childhood studies—all fueled the fireworks. While much has been written about Carroll’s biography and his influence on children’s literature, Beer convincingly shows him at play in the spaces of Victorian cultural and intellectual life, drawing on then-current controversies, reading prodigiously across many fields, and writing on multiple levels to please both children and adults in different ways. With a welcome combination of learning and lightness, Beer reminds us that Carroll’s books are essentially about curiosity, its risks and pleasures. Along the way, Alice in Space shares Alice’s exceptional ability to spark curiosity in us, too.

    While each person responds differently to trauma, its presence in our lives nonetheless marks a continual thread through human history and prehistory. In Critical Trauma Studies, a diverse group of writers, activists, and scholars of sociology, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies reflects on the study of trauma and how multidisciplinary approaches lend richness and a sense of deeper understanding to this burgeoning field of inquiry. The original essays within this collection cover topics such as female suicide bombers from the Chechen Republic, singing prisoners in Iranian prison camps, sexual assault and survivor advocacy, and families facing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. As it proceeds, Critical Trauma Studies never loses sight of the way those who study trauma as an academic field, and those who experience, narrate, and remediate trauma as a personal and embodied event, inform one another. Theoretically adventurous and deeply particular, this book aims to advance trauma studies as a discipline that transcends intellectual boundaries, to be mapped but also to be unmoored from conceptual and practical imperatives. Remaining embedded in lived experiences and material realities, Critical Trauma Studies frames the field as both richly unbounded and yet clearly defined, historical, and evidence-based.

    How writers understand and use history can play an equally important role in how they navigate a novel. This book explores the nature of the author's relationship with history and fiction - often using writers' own words - as well as the role history plays in fiction. Focusing on genre fiction, this study considers key issues in the relationship between history and fiction, such as how writers contextualise the history they use in their fiction and how they incorporate historical research. The book also addresses the related topic of world building using history, discussing the connections between the science fiction writers' notion of world building and the scholarly understanding of story space and explaining the mechanics of constructing the world of the novel. This book places the writing of fiction into a wider framework of history and writing and encourages dialogue between writers and historians.

    Taking up acts of abandonment, rejection, and refusal that have long baffled critics, he shows how renunciation has reframed the relationship of artists and intellectuals to society in productive and unpredictable ways.In a work of remarkable synthesis that includes traditions and genres from antiquity to postmodernity, Posnock discovers connections among disparate figures ranging from Lao Tzu to Dave Chappelle and Bob Dylan. The thread running through these acts of renunciation, he argues, is an aesthetic and ethical resistance to the demand that one's words and actions be straightforward and immediately comprehensible. Modern art in particular valorizes the nonconceptual and the intuitive, seeking to make silence articulate and incompletion fertile.Renouncers reject not only artistic and scholarly conventions but also the public roles that attend them. Wittgenstein, Rimbaud, and Glenn Gould brazenly flouted professional and popular expectations, demanding that philosophy, poetry, music play by new rules. Emerson and Nietzsche severed all institutional ties, while William James waged a guerrilla campaign from his post at Harvard against what all three considered to be the enemy: the pernicious philosophical insistence on rationality. Posnock also examines renunciations in light of World War II--the veterans J. D. Salinger and George Oppen, and the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan--while a fourth cluster includes the mystic Thomas Merton and the abstract painters Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin.

    Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.

    The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusive—very like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in this stimulating and original study. Moreover, our desire to master this elusiveness, to “pluck the heart out of its mystery,” as Hamlet himself says, precisely mirrors what is going on in the play; and what Shakespeare's play demonstrates is that to conceive human character (and works of art) in this way is profoundly misguided.   Rather than rushing to conclusions or setting out a theory of what Hamlet is “about,” therefore, we should read and watch patiently and openly, allowing the play to unfold before us in its own time and trying to see each moment in the context of the whole. Josipovici’s valuable book is thus an exercise in analysis which puts the physical experience of watching and reading at the heart of the critical process—at once a practical introduction to a great and much-loved play and a sophisticated intervention in some of the key questions of theory and aesthetics of our time.

    Thomas Jefferson, author of the country’s Declaration of Independence and a future US president himself, called the work “the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written.” The Federalist Papers looked to persuade Americans that it was in their interest to back a strong national government enshrined in a constitution. Why? Because the three men who wrote the essays were convinced this was the only way to knit the newborn country together, while still preserving individual liberties. That constitution—drafted in the late-eighteenth century—still governs the US today and is the oldest written constitution in the world still in force. The book remains essential reading for anyone interested in the birth of democracy and for those who want to interpret the US Constitution according to its original intent.

    Montgomery's 1921 novel about the Canadian home-front during World War I, is both moving and at times very funny. Montgomery's original handwritten manuscript of 518 pages, along with 71 pages of notes, survives today, housed at the University of Guelph. The manuscript has been painstakingly rendered in a readable format by Kate Waterston, and is available here, with an introduction by Montgomery expert Elizabeth Waterston. This edition enables us to witness the process of Montgomery's literary refinement as she edited her own work. The world has changed much since 1921: books are now mostly composed on computer, leaving little record of a writer's creative journey. But editing is a key part of the process, and here is one of the most detailed records of it available.

    With a painful awareness that our understanding of the past informs our understanding of the present—and vice versa—the contributors place slavery’s historical legacies in conversation with twenty-first-century manifestations of antiblack violence, dehumanization, and social death.    Through an exploration of film, drama, fiction, performance art, graphic novels, and philosophical discourse, this volume considers how artists grapple with questions of representation, as they ask whether slavery can ever be accurately depicted, trace the scars that slavery has left on a traumatized body politic, or debate how to best convey that black lives matter. The Psychic Hold of Slavery thus raises provocative questions about how we behold the historically distinct event of African diasporic enslavement and how we might hold off the transhistorical force of antiblack domination.

    It makes a scholarly, lively and convincing case that the Gothic makes horror respectable, and establishes contemporary women's Gothic fictions in and against traditional Gothic. The book provides new, engaging perspectives on established contemporary women Gothic writers, with a particular focus on Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. It explores how the Gothic is malleable in their hands and is used to demythologise oppressions based on difference in gender and ethnicity. The study presents new Gothic work and new nuances, critiques of dangerous complacency and radical questionings of what is safe and conformist in works as diverse as Twilight (Stephenie Meyer) and A Girl Walks Home Alone (Ana Lily Amirpur), as well as by Anne Rice and Poppy Brite. It also introduces and critically explores postcolonial, vampire and neohistorical Gothic and women's ghost stories.

    Ignorance plays a powerful role in shaping public opinion, channeling our politics, and even directing scholarly research. The first collection of essays to grapple with the historical interplay between education and ignorance, Miseducation finds ignorance--and its social production through naivete, passivity, and active agency--at the center of many pivotal historical developments. Ignorance allowed Americans to maintain the institution of slavery, Nazis to promote ideas of race that fomented genocide in the 1930s, and tobacco companies to downplay the dangers of cigarettes. Today, ignorance enables some to deny the fossil record and others to ignore climate science.A. J. Angulo brings together seventeen experts from across the scholarly spectrum to explore how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education. Each chapter identifies education as a critical site for advancing our still-limited understanding of what exactly ignorance is, where it comes from, and how it is diffused, maintained, and regulated in society.Miseducation also challenges the notion that schools are, ideally, unimpeachable sites of knowledge production, access, and equity. By investigating how laws, myths, national aspirations, and global relations have recast and, at times, distorted the key purposes of education, this pathbreaking book sheds light on the role of ignorance in shaping ideas, public opinion, and policy.

    It addresses central issues of recent Williams scholarship and discusses a wide variety of topics: Williams and the visual arts, Williams and medicine, Williams's version of local modernism, Williams and gender, Williams and multiculturalism, and more. Authors examine Williams's relationships with figures such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and H. D. and Marianne Moore, and illustrate the importance of his legacy for Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, Robert Lowell, and numerous contemporary poets. Featuring a chronology and an up-to-date bibliography of the writer, The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams is an invaluable guide for students of this influential literary figure.

    The impact of digital media and archives on the field informs all discussions of the print archive. Contributors illustrate their arguments with examples and contextualize their topics within broader areas of study, while also reflecting on how the study of periodicals may evolve in the future. The Handbook will serve as a valuable resource for scholars and students of nineteenth-century culture who are interested in issues of cultural formation, transformation, and transmission in a developing industrial and globalizing age, as well as those whose research focuses on the bibliographical and the micro case study. In addition to rendering a comprehensive review and critique of current research on nineteenth-century British periodicals, the Handbook suggests new avenues for research in the twenty-first century.This volume's 30 chapters deal with practically every aspect of periodical research and with the specific topics and audiences the 19th-century periodical press addressed. It also covers matters such as digitization that did not exist or were in early development a generation ago. In addition to the essays, readers will find 50 illustrations, 54 pages of bibliography, and a chronology of the periodical press. This book gives seemingly endless insights into the ways periodicals and newspapers influenced and reflected 19th-century culture. It not only makes readers aware of problems involved in interpreting the history of the press but also offers suggestions for ways of untangling them and points the direction for future research. It will be a valuable resource for readers with interests in almost any aspect of 19th-century Britain. Summing Up: Highly recommended - J. D. Vann, University of North Texas in CHOICE

    Skorczewski, author of An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton   “An important collection of new critical views. Draws from a range of critics, as well as poets, to assess why Sexton’s work remains viable, forceful, and beloved.”—Linda Wagner-Martin, author of A History of American Literature: 1950 to the Present   One of America’s most influential women writers, Anne Sexton has long been overshadowed by fellow confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell and is seldom featured in literary criticism. This volume reassesses Sexton and her poetry for the first time in two decades and offers directions for future Sexton scholarship.   With new access to her archives, the scholars and poets featured here consider Sexton’s industry and her wide range of production. Five literary critics interpret her poetry in relation to photography, performance, poetry readings, the role of institutions, and midcentury culture. Five poets illuminate Sexton’s poetic subjects, her responses to her contemporaries, and her legacy. Notable in presenting Sexton the educator and public figure, the contributors to This Business of Words reveal Sexton’s efforts to build a successful career without a university education, consider her relationships with peers and various media, and interpret her strategies for teaching, critiquing poems, and delivering readings.   As its critical and creative perspectives intersect, this volume inspires new questions about Sexton’s poems and how to interpret them. It maps the influence of Sexton’s craft on twenty-first-century cultural contexts and emphasizes her continuing vitality.

    K. Chesterton felt that the world was almost always in permanent danger of being misjudged or even overlooked, and so the pursuit of understanding, insight, and awareness was his perpetual preoccupation. Being sensitive to the boundaries and possibilities of perception, he was always encouraging his audience to find a clear view of things. His belief was that it really is possible, albeit in a limited way, to see things as they are. This book, which marries Chesterton's unique perspective with the discipline of philosophical hermeneutics, aims to outline what Chesterton can teach us about reading, interpreting, and participating in the drama of meaning as it unfolds before us in words and in the world. Strictly speaking, of course, Chesterton is not a hermeneutic philosopher, but his vast body of work involves important hermeneutic considerations. In fact, his unique interpretive approach seems to be the subtext and implicit fascination of all Chesterton scholarship to date, and yet this book is the first to comprehensively focus on the issue. By taking Chesterton back to his philosophical roots--via his marginalia, his approach to literary criticism, his Platonist-Thomist metaphysics, and his Catholic theology--this book explicitly and compellingly tackles the philosophical assumptions and goals that underpin his unique posture towards reality. "Philosophically sophisticated but readily accessible, this highly original study shows what it was that made Chesterton so excellent a reader both of texts and of the world as a whole." --Aidan Nichols, Prior, Blackfriars Cambridge, UK "What trait do we most admire in Chesterton? I submit it is his vision, his ability to see things as they are. In this remarkably thorough and well-documented book, Reyburn transfers Chesterton's pince-nez to our own noses. He conveys not just a description of Chesterton's hermeneutic, but gives us a rewarding experience of it. A welcome romp with Chesterton, the ocular athlete." --David W. Fagerberg, Professor, University of Notre Dame "In this work on Chesterton's drama of meaning, he shines forth as characteristically holistic, sane, joyous, and alert--at once wary of any easy 'self-evident' access to the way things are and yet hopeful in presenting ways to see the world more clearly. Reyburn's book, both scholarly and accessible, is more lively than any work about philosophical hermeneutics has the right to be." --Christopher Ben Simpson, Professor of Philosophical Theology, Lincoln Christian University; Author, The Truth Is the Way: Kierkegaard's Theologia Viatorum "Of the many books on G. K. Chesterton, Duncan Reyburn's deserves its own special place. Indeed it is unique. For the first time, those wishing to dig deep into the mind of Chesterton, the master of paradox, can follow the hermeneutic path that Reyburn ploughs, in which, page after page, he churns up the surface of Chesterton's wit that he might get to the heart of the wisdom that lies beneath." --Joseph Pearce, Author, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton; Director, Center for Faith and Culture, Aquinas College "For far too long Chesterton has been undervalued as a philosopher, and the radicalism of his thought unacknowledged. Duncan Reyburn's superb exploration of the dramatic nature of his hermeneutics is thus a timely and original contribution to Chesterton studies, revealing on what resilient theological basis the sparkling epigrams depend." --Alison Milbank, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham; Author, Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real Duncan Reyburn a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of P