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Narrative plays a central role for individual and collective lives - this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. The present volume aims to actualize and further substantiate the case for literature and narrative, taking inspiration from Vera Nünning's eminent scholarship over the past decades. Engaging with her formative interdisciplinary work, the volume seeks to explore potentials of change through the transformative power of literature and narrative - to be harnessed by individuals and groups as agents of positive change in today's world. The book is located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology and is concerned with the way literature affects individuals, how it works at an intersubjective level, enabling communication and community, and how it furthers social and cultural change.
Winner of the Native American Literature Symposium's Beatrice Medicine Award for Published Monograph The first extensive study of contemporary Hawaiian literature, Finding Meaning examines kaona, the practice of hiding and finding meaning, for its profound connectivity. Through kaona, author Brandy Nalani McDougall affirms the tremendous power of Indigenous stories and genealogies to give lasting meaning to decolonization movements.
Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.
At a time when migration is mostly discussed in terms of “conflict” and “crisis”, it is decidedly important to acknowledge the discursive traditions, narrative patterns, and conceptual categories that continue to inform how migration is represented, analyzed and theorized in contemporary Europe. This volume focuses on the potential of artistic and critical practices to challenge hegemonic framings of migration and embrace the ambivalence inherent in migration as a conflictual, often violent, yet also liberating uprooting. By placing special emphasis on “peripheral” perspectives and subject positions, the volume provides new insights into topics such as belonging and exclusion, the “migrant crisis”, and memory. By bringing into dialogue creative practices and academic discourses, it explores how new modes of seeing and theorizing may emerge through experiences and representations of migration. Situated within the field of literary and cultural studies, it complements historical and social analyses in the emerging interdisciplinary field of migration studies.
While the it-narrative, the thing-poem and thing theatre have been around for some time, the essay – which is often considered literature’s fourth genre – is still lacking its thing-subgenre. Yet, particularly British and Anglo-Irish literature display a long, albeit so far implicit tradition of texts that can be categorised as ‘thing-essays’: Starting with Jonathan Swift’s “Meditation upon a Broomstick” (1701) and continuing until today, these texts draw broader insights from the contemplation of a material item of daily life. This book provides the first theoretical conceptualisation of this genre. Bringing elements from essay studies and the New Materialisms together, it s...
Staking Claim analyzes Hawai'i at the crossroads of competing claims for identity, belonging, and political status. Judy Rohrer argues that the dual settler colonial processes of racializing native Hawaiians (erasing their indigeneity), and indigenizing non-Hawaiians, enable the staking of non-Hawaiian claims to Hawai'i.
Kateri Tekakwitha is the first North American Indian to be canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Indian Pilgrims examines Saint Kateri's influence and role as a powerful feminine figure who inspires decolonizing activism in contemporary Indigenous peoples' lives.
Native Studies Keywords is a genealogical project that looks at the history of words that claim to have no history. The end goal is not to determine which words are appropriate but to critically examine words that are crucial to Native studies, in hopes of promoting debate and critical interrogation.
What does it mean to be a Navajo (Diné) person today? What does it mean to “respect tradition”? How can a contemporary life be informed by the traditions of the past? These are the kinds of questions addressed by contributors to this unusual and pathbreaking book. All of the contributors are coming to personal terms with a phrase that underpins the matrix of Diné culture: Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhóón. Often referred to simply as SNBH, the phrase can be translated in many ways but is generally understood to mean “one’s journey of striving to live a long, harmonious life.” The book offers a variety of perspectives of Diné men and women on the Diné cultural paradigm that ...
This open access collection of essays examines the literary advice industry since its emergence in Anglo-American literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century within the context of the professionalization of the literary field and the continued debate on creative writing as art and craft. Often dismissed as commercial and stereotypical by authors and specialists alike, literary advice has nonetheless remained a flourishing business, embodying the unquestioned values of a literary system, but also functioning as a sign of a literary system in transition. Exploring the rise of new online amateur writing cultures in the twenty-first century, this collection of essays considers how literary advice proliferates globally, leading to new forms and genres.