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This collection examines the intersections between the personal and the political in travel writing, and the dialectic between mobility and stasis, through an analysis of specific cases across geographical and historical boundaries. The authors explore the various ways in which travel texts represent actual political conditions and thus engage in discussions about national, transnational, and global citizenship; how they propose real-world political interventions in the places where the traveler goes; what tone they take toward political or socio-political violence; and how they intersect with political debates. Travel writing can be viewed as political in a purely instrumental sense, but, a...
Fear in its many facets appears to constitute an intriguing and compelling subject matter for writers and screenwriters alike. The contributions address fictional representations and explorations of fear in different genres and different periods of literary and cultural history. The topics include representations of political violence and political fear in English Renaissance culture and literature; dramatic representations of fear and anxiety in English Romanticism; the dramatic monologue as an expression of fears in Victorian society; cultural constructions of fear and empathy in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jonathan Nasaw's Fear Itself (2003); facets of children's fears in twentieth- and twenty-first-century stream-of-consciousness fiction; the representation of fear in war movies; the cultural function of horror film remakes; the expulsion of fear in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go and fear and nostalgia in Mohsin Hamid's post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.
A writer of fiction, literary criticism, travel narratives and libretti, E M Forster is best known for his beautifully-structured novels which held a mirror up to the English class system. This fascinating collection of diaries, travel journals and itineraries brings together all unpublished material Forster wrote which can be classed as ‘memoir’.
Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth offers ecocritical and ecopoetic readings that focus on multispecies dwellings of enchantment and reenchant our rapport with the more-than-human world. It sheds light on the marvelous entanglements between humans and other life forms coexisting with us–entanglements that, when fully perceived, call onto humans to shift perspectives on both the causes and solutions to current ecological crises. Working against the disenchantment of humans’ relationships with and perceptions of the world entailed by a modern ontology, this book illustrates the power of ecopoetics to attune humans to the vibrant matter both within and outside of us. Braiding indigenous with non-indigenous worldviews, this book tackles ecopoetics emerging from varying locations in the world. It underscores the postmodernist, remythologizing processes going on in many ecopoetic texts, via magical realist modes and mythopoeia.
Informed by both new and old media theory, materialist approaches to the study of everyday objects, and a series of close readings that chart the critical history of postcard use in the fiction and correspondence of Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, James Joyce, and Wilfred Owen, this book locates and attempts to rediscover lost, misplaced, and neglected postcard materialities, as they relate to the archiving, editing, publishing, and fictional repurposing of postcards across Anglo-American Literary Modernism (1880-1939). It argues that postcards need to be recognized as important early twentieth-century communication technologies and distinctly modernist textualities, composed of multimedia, ...
The Politics to Come brings together an international collection of thinkers to consider the meaning of liberal democratic modernity at a moment when its future has never been less certain. It examines the explosive threats the liberal order confronts today: financial meltdown, religious extremism, environmental catastrophe. Yet, it also seeks to place these - singularly modern - crises within a much longer history. For the contributors to this collection, it is the ancient religious tradition called 'the messianic' that provides the critical lens through which modernity may be interrogated. In its ongoing struggles with the messianic, liberal modernity confronts the promise and threat of a radically new Politics to Come. So what are the Politics to Come? How do they manifest themselves throughout history? Why does the possibility of a messianic judgement continue to haunt the western political imaginary? This collection offers a series of political, philosophical and theological perspectives from which the future of liberal modernity - if it has one - can be imagined.
Eastern Encounters releases early Canadian women writers from a simple focus on autobiography and racial politics and interrogates their specific and sophisticated Asian influences. With a compelling reconstruction of historical context, Ganz has created perhaps the first book in a much-needed series that will revisit Canadian nationalism through the important cultural exchanges she examines. Though shaped with an Asian readership in mind, Eastern Encounters is an important work for all who wish to challenge the notion that Judeo-Christian traditions almost exclusively shaped early Canadian discourse.
Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive. On the one hand, literary censorship has been posited as not only inescapable but definitive, even foundational to speech itself. One the other, especially after the opening of the USSR's spekstrahn, those enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, the push to redefine censorship expansively has encountered cogent criticism. Scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the dif...