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Using a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, the contributing scholars to this collection analyze culturally specific and globally held attitudes about mothers and mothering, as represented in world cinema. Examining films from a range of countries including Afghanistan, India, Iran, Eastern Europe, Canada, and the United States, the various chapters contextualize the socio-cultural realities of motherhood as they are represented on screen, and explore the maternal figure as she has been glamorized and celebrated, while simultaneously subjected to public scrutiny. Collectively, this scholarly investigation provides insights into where women’s struggles converge, while also highlighting the dramatically different realities of women around the globe.
Making and Seeing Modern Texts explores the poetics of texts through a close reading and analysis across the genres of poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction travel literature and theory. This volume demonstrates that prose, as much as poetry, share the making and seeing of language, literary practice, and theory. Genre, then, is presented as a guide that crosses multiple boundaries. This volume selects different ways to examine texts, discussing Michael Ondaatje’s early poetry and examining narrative in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. The book examines images in poetry, narrative in fiction, prefaces in non-fiction, metatheatre in drama, and attempts to see the modern and postmodern in theory, all of which show us the complexities of modernity or later modernity. One of the innovations is that the author, a literary critic/theorist, poet and historian, takes his training in practice and theory and shows, through examples of each, how language operates across genres.
If literature has often informed the creation of a national imaginary—a sense of common history and destiny—it has also complicated, even challenged, the unifying vision assumed in the formation of a national literature and sense of nation. National Literature in Multinational States questions the persistent association of literature and nation-states, contrasting this with the reality of multinational and ethnocultural diversity. The contributors to this collection interrogate concepts and manifestations of nationalism in the context of literary production while evaluating the place of national literatures in multinational states at a time when social unity and political agreement have never been more elusive. The volume strives for synoptic analysis via the complementary, multifaceted treatment of literary creation in several geo-cultural contexts: Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, India, and Nigeria. Contributors: Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay, Albert Braz, Matthew Cormier, Doris Hambuch, Clara A.B. Joseph, Paul D. Morris, Asma Sayed, Matthew Tétreault, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, Jerry White
Letters from Khartoum is a partial biography of Scottish educator, D.R. Ewen, and of the teaching of English Literature at the University of Khartoum, from the time of the late Anglo-Egyptian Condominium through to Independence and the October 1964 Revolution.
"This fascinating book presents a wide-ranging collection of interdisciplinary research on Gujarati identities in India and the diaspora. An international group of women researchers from different academic backgrounds has gathered a rich set of data that provide fresh insights and raise many searching questions. We find here theoretical and practical perspectives linked to social, cultural, historical, literary and personal concerns that will appeal to and challenge a wide readership. A most remarkable volume on which the editors are to be congratulated." Professor Ursula King FRSA University of Bristol "In this welcome volume, women scholars draw out the many facets of identity as it is forged in the minds and bodies, and social, spiritual and business worlds of Gujaratis in India and the diaspora. It is rare indeed to find a book which discusses in such detail the impact of gender and ethnicity on the research process as well as on the lives of those studied." Professor Kim Knott University of Lancaster
Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South scrutinizes current debates to bring historical and contemporary South-South entanglements to the fore and to develop a new understanding of world literature in a multipolar world of globalized modernity. The volume challenges established ideas of world literature by rethinking the concept along the notion of “entanglements”: as a field of variously criss-crossing relations of literary activity beyond the confines of literary canons, cultural containers, or national borders. The collection presents individual case studies from a variety of language traditions that focus on particular literary relationships and practices across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe as well as new fictional, poetical, and theoretical conceptions of world literature in order to broaden our understanding of the multilateral entanglements within a widening communicative network that shape our globalized world.
In 1938, when faced with a decision to work at a shoe company in India or stay in Czechoslovakia and wait for another war, Miki Hruska’s newly married parents opted to move, thinking they would return home in a few years. But they would not be able to return “home” for another four decades; instead, home became Calcutta, where they raised their family and established a business during a parade of turbulent social and political events. The ill-planned departure of the British from India and their bungled attempts at Partition engendered riots and killings that brought bloodshed to the family’s front door. And when the Communists took over the government of West Bengal, they brought labour disruptions that made it next to impossible to operate the family business. This riveting family memoir is set during the cataclysmic events of WWII and its aftermath, giving a harrowing yet heartwarming portrait of life for a migrant Czech family and showing how perseverance and love can sustain people through the darkest of times.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. This volume examines the complex and inter-disciplinary issue of diaspora in the context of globalisation and contributing social, historical and cultural factors of the modern world. Each chapter offers a distinct point of view and a particular way of understanding diasporas in numerous cultures and societies in different parts of the globe. The collection consists of a series of detailed analyses of aspects ranging from diasporic representations in the cinema, literature and poetry to diasporic projections in current socio-political and international matters. Each chapter provides an individual examination of a particular aspect of diaspora in order to frame a bigger picture of modern diasporic choices.
Mothers, Community, and Friendship is an anthology that explores the complexities of mothering/motherhood, communities, and friendship from across interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives. The chapters in this text not only examine how communities and friendship shape and influence the various spectrums of motherhood, but also analyze how communities and friendship are necessary for mothers. Through personal, reflective, critical essays, and ethnographies, this collection situates the ways mothers are connected to communities and how these relationships forms, such as in mothering groups and maternal friendships. By calling attention to these central and current topics, Mothers, Community, and Friendship represents how communities and friendship become means of empowerment for mothers.
Virginity is of concern here, that is its utter messiness. At once valuable and detrimental, normative and deviant, undesirable and enviable. Virginity and its loss hold tremendous cultural significance. For many, female virginity is still a universally accepted condition, something that is somehow bound to the hymen, whereas male virginity is almost as elusive as the G-spot: we know it's there, it’s just we have a harder time finding it. Of course boys are virgins, queers are virgins, some people reclaim their virginities, and others reject virginity from the get go. So what if we agree to forget the hymen all together? Might we start to see the instability of terms like untouched, pure, ...