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Enric Valor (1911–2000) is one of the most important Valencian authors of the 20th century. He has been, until now, almost completely unknown to an English-speaking audience. Following the publication of Valencian Folktales (2023), this second collection of his tales will help to consolidate work done on Valor in English, opening up both his fiction and the specificity of Valencian culture to Anglophone readers. The stories included here offer a sampling of the various types of tales he wrote: magical-theme tales, local-color tales and tales with personified animals. Valor collected these stories from the inhabitants of small towns and villages in the south of the Valencian territory and l...
Enric Valor is one of the most important Valencian authors of the 20th century. This selection of his highly popular rondalles (folk tales) will for the first time introduce his work to an English-speaking audience. At a time when Catalan was under threat from the cultural bulldozer of the Franco regime, which condemned the use of anything but Castilian Spanish in public communication, Valor went to great lengths to disseminate knowledge of the language, through writing grammars and linguistic studies, as well as teaching it to fellow inmates when he was imprisoned by the regime for his cultural activities. These tales, collected over a number of years in small villages in the province of Al...
Boasian Verse explores the understudied poetic output of three major twentieth-century anthropologists: Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Providing a comparative analysis of their anthropological and poetic works, this volume explores the divergent representations of cultural others and the uses of ethnographic studies for cultural critique. This volume aims to illuminate central questions, including: Why did they choose to write poetry about their ethnographic endeavors? Why did they choose to write the way they wrote? Was poetry used to approach the objects of their research in different, perhaps ethically more viable ways? Did poetry allow them to transcend their own primiti...
Poetry moves us. Sometimes a poem changes our life. Then we analyze it as a cultural artifact with no special connection to us. An extensive critical apparatus enables us to develop sophisticated interpretations, but we dismiss as "idiosyncratic" even life-changing experiences of poetry. We need an apparatus to unfold our experience of reading poems into a more effective relationship with the world. Modern poets in particular wrote prophetic verse for this purpose. Archetypal psychology and phenomenology describe the soul that modern poetry moves in us. Three prosodic mechanisms activate the psyche. The polyphony of accentual and quantitative versification creates depth to lure the soul. Aural images reshape the reader’s stream of consciousness. Readers follow the movement of blocks of verse across the expanse of the page with what Maurice Merleau-Ponty terms the phenomenal body. These mechanisms reach us at the collective level of consciousness and generate the power we need to solve big, collective challenges, such as race, climate change, and inequality.
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, ...
This book explores the great influence of twentieth-century artists and art movements on many major writers of the twentieth century. It focuses in particular on four seminal writers who were strongly influenced by very different movements: they are Gertrude Stein and Cubism, William S. Burroughs and Dada, J. G. Ballard and Surrealism, and Douglas Coupland and Pop Art. For these authors the presence and influence of these art movements is not limited to a small cluster of texts, but can be felt much more expansively across their work, infiltrating all manner of multifarious and complex dimensions. These authors are all keen to explore new methods of shifting the signature styles and forms of...
Queer Kinship in Sarah Schulman’s AIDS Novels is the first book to extensively discuss the works of Sarah Schulman, a journalist, activist and globally recognized novelist. This research monograph juxtaposes the works about the AIDS epidemic which were well-received by the mainstream America with Schulman’s own output as a “bard of AIDS burnout,” in the words of Edmund White. In contrast with the prevailing representations of the epidemic, her works emphasize the importance of queer kinship, chosen families and AIDS activist groups that fall outside of the heteronorm. Bearing witness to these voluntary collectivities means also surviving the traumatizing experience of ongoing, repeated death and refusing the idea of an easy solution to the crisis. The monograph tracks the tension between the dominant narratives about the epidemic and those articulated from the excluded positions, arguing that Schulman reformulates queer kinship as the locus of social change.
The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myŏng-sun offers an introduction to Korea’s first modern woman writer to publish a collection of creative works, Kim Myŏng-sun (1896–ca. 1954). Despite attempts by male contemporaries to assassinate her character, Kim was an outspoken writer and an early feminist, confronting patriarchal Korean society in essays, plays, poems, and short stories. This volume is the first to offer a detailed analysis in English of Kim’s poetry. The poems examined in this volume can be considered early twentieth-century versions of #MeToo literature, mirroring the harrowing account of her sexual assault, and also subversive challenges to traditional institutions, dealing with themes such as romantic free love, same-sex love, single womanhood, and explicit female desire and passion. The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myŏng-sun restores a long-neglected woman writer to her rightful place in the history of Korean literature, shedding light on the complexity of women’s lives in Korea and contributing to the growing interest in modern Korean women’s literature in the West.
This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945-65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985-2012). The comparison of these novels (by Ken Kesey, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, and Peter Matthiessen) with their film adaptations offers the opportunity for a historical reassessment not only of the novels themselves but also of the global counterculture of the years 1965-75, which they prefigure in a variety of ways. Appearing more than a decade after the waning of the counterculture and in some cases as much ...
Joyce as Theory is the first book-length examination of James Joyce to argue he can be read as a theorist. Joyce is not just a favourite case study of literary theory; he wrote about how we make meaning, and to what effect. The present volume traces his hermeneutics in those narratives in Finnegans Wake which deal with textual production and interpretation, showing that the Wake’s difficulty exemplifies Joyce’s theoretical stance. All reading involves responding to problems we cannot quite fathom. This preoccupation places Joyce alongside Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Joyce as Theory revives debates on theory with a linguistic focus, laying open misconceptions that have muddled atte...