Stéphanie A.H. Bélanger and Renée Dickason (eds.), War Memories: Commemoration, Recollections, and Writings on War

McGill- Queen’s University Press 2017.

4489 pages
ISBN-10: 0773547932
ISBN-13: 978-0773547933

Shaping individual and collective war memories through the art of commemoration.

War Memories explores the patchwork formed by collective memory, public remembrance, private recollection, and the ways in which they form a complex composition of observations, initiatives, and experiences.

Offering an international perspective on war commemoration, contributors consider the process of assembling historical facts and subjective experiences to show how these points of view diverge according to various social, cultural, political, and historical perspectives. Encompassing the representations of wars in the English-speaking world over the last hundred years, this collection presents an extensive, yet integrated, reflection on various types of commemoration and interpretations of events. Essays respond to common questions regarding war memory: how and why do we remember war? What does commemoration tell us about the actors in wars? How does commemoration reflect contemporary society’s culture of war?

War Memories disseminates current knowledge on the performance, interpretation, and rewriting of facts and events during and after wars, while focusing on how patriotic fervour, resistance, conscientious objection, injury, trauma, and propaganda contribute to the shaping of individual and collective memory.

Continue reading “Book Announcement: War Memories – Commemoration, Recollections, and Writings on War” →

Carlo M. Bajetta (ed.), Elizabeth I’s Italian Letters

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Hardcover and e-book: lxxvii + 285 pages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st ed. 2017
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1137442328
ISBN-13: 978-1137442321
Series: “Queenship and Power”

Contents 

Introduction (pp. xxi- lxxvii)
Letters 1-29 (pp. 1-250)
Appendix 1 [letter 30] (pp. 251-259)
Bibliography (pp. 261-275)
Index of names (pp. 277- 285)

With 9 illustrations from the original manuscripts

About the volume

This is the first edition ever of the Queen’s correspondence in Italian. These letters cast a new light on her talents as a linguist and provide interesting details as to her political agenda, and on the cultural milieu of her court. This book provides a fresh analysis of the surviving evidence concerning Elizabeth’s learning and use of Italian, and of the activity of the members of her ‘Foreign Office.’ All of the documents transcribed here are accompanied by a short introduction focusing on their content and context, a brief description of their transmission history, and an English translation.

Continue reading “Book Announcement: Elizabeth I’s Italian Letters” →

Michael Dobson and Estelle Rivier-Arnaud (eds.), Rewriting Shakespeare’s Plays For and By the Contemporary Stage

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 1 June 2017. 195 pages

ISBN-10: 1443882801
ISBN-13: 978-1443882804

Why have contemporary playwrights been obsessed by Shakespeare’s plays to such an extent that most of the canon has been rewritten by one rising dramatist or another over the last half century? Among other key figures, Edward Bond, Heiner Müller, Carmelo Bene, Arnold Wesker, Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker, Botho Strauss, Tim Crouch, Bernard Marie Koltès, and Normand Chaurette have all put their radical originality into the service of adapting four-century-old classics. The resulting works provide food for thought on issues such as Shakespearean role-playing, narrative and structural re-shuffling. Across the world, new writers have questioned the political implications and cultural stakes of repeating Shakespeare with and without a difference, finding inspiration in their own national experiences and in the different ordeals they have undergone. How have our contemporaries carried out their rewritings, and with what aims? Can we still play Hamlet, for instance, as Dieter Lesage asks in his book bearing this title, or do we have to kill Shakespeare as Normand Chaurette implies in a work where his own creative process is detailed? What do these rewritings really share with their sources? Are they meaningful only because of Shakespeares shadow haunting them? Where do we draw the lines between interpretation, adaptation and rewriting? The contributors to this collection of essays examine modern rewritings of Shakespeare from both theoretical and pragmatic standpoints. Key questions include: can a rewriting be meaningful without the readers or spectators already knowing Shakespeare? Do modern rewritings supplant Shakespeares texts or curate them? Does the survival of Shakespeare in the theatrical repertory actually depend on the continued dramatization of our difficult encounters with these potentially obsolete scripts represented by rewriting? Continue reading “Book Announcement: Rewriting Shakespeare’s Plays For and By the Contemporary Stage” →

Paula Harrington and Ronald Jenn, Mark Twain & France: The Making of a New American Identity

University of Missouri Press (USA), 2017

Blending cultural history, biography, and literary criticism, this book explores how one of America’s greatest icons used the French to help build a new sense of what it is to be “American” in the second half of the nineteenth century.

While critics have generally dismissed Mark Twain’s relationship with France as hostile, Harrington and Jenn see Twain’s use of the French as a foil to help construct his identity as “the representative American.” Examining new materials that detail his Montmatre study, the carte de visite album, and a chronology of his visits to France, the book offers close readings of writings that have been largely ignored, such as The Innocents Adrift manuscript and the unpublished chapters of A Tramp Abroad, combining literary analysis, socio-historical context and biographical research.

About the authors

Paula Harrington, Colby College, Maine, USA
Ronald Jenn, Université Charles de Gaulle, Lille 3, France

Arnaud Schmitt, The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making it Real

© 2017 – Routledge

Making it Real takes a deep dive into the experience of the reader. Dr. Schmitt argues that current trends in the field of life writing have taken the focus away from the text and the initial purpose of autobiography as a means for the author to communicate with a reader and narrate an experience. The study puts autobiography back into a communicational context, and putting forth the notion that one of the reasons why life writing can so often be aesthetically unsatisfactory, or difficult to distinguish from novels, is because it should not be considered as a literary genre, but as a modality with radically different rules and means of evaluation. In other words, not only is autobiography radically different from fiction due to its referentiality, but, first and foremost, it should be read differently.

Details: https://www.routledge.com/The-Phenomenology-of-Autobiography-Making-it-Real/Schmitt/p/book/9781138710290

New Perspectives on Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”, co-edited by Sophie Chiari, Sophie Lemercier-Goddard and Michèle Vignaux

Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal
Mai 2017

ISBN (Book) : 978-2-84516-756-8
ISBN (PDF) : 978-2-84516-757-5

A favourite with audiences and critics alike, Shakespeare’s As You Like It owes part of its appeal to its seemingly endless capacity for recreation. Despite the apparent simplicity of its plot, it offers a whole gamut of emotions and engages with the act of counterfeiting, thereby proposing a multiplicity of mirror games, from its binary and symmetrical structure to its linguistic games and ritual inversions. Yet, the comedy’s “true delights” (5.4.182) should not overshadow its deep social and political relevance. This volume intends to shed fresh light on Shakespeare’s “green” comedy so as to emphasise its powerful resonances today. Divided into four parts, it first deals with some of the main ecocritical issues at work in the play before examining Shakespeare’s reassessment of human nature. The volume then proceeds with the experimental dimension of As You Like It and explores specific issues related to staging and editing. An Epilogue presented as a question-and-answer session provides clarifying remarks on the comedy’s rich literary background. Working with a variety of approaches, these essays highlight the complexity of a fascinating play while taking stock of the recent critical trends in Shakespearean studies.

Details

Website of PUBP
Table of Contents

About the Volume
Table of Contents

Laurence Lux-Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality 

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5261-1005-3

Details: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526110053/

This study of English Benedictine nuns is based upon a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes. It highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences, illustrating the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. It shows how Benedictine convents were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home, but also proposes a different approach to the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns’ personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.​

Silke Stroh, Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination: Anglophone Writing from 1600 to 1900

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017

331 pages

Paperback: regular price $39.95; current discount price: $30 (to obtain the discount, order directly from the publisher at www.nupress.northwestern.edu and cite the discount code NU2016); ISBN 978-0-8101-3405-8

Hardback: $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8101-3403-4
E-book: $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8101-3404-1

Can Scotland be considered an English colony? Is its experience and literature comparable to that of overseas postcolonial countries? Or are such comparisons no more than patriotic victimology to mask Scottish complicity in the British Empire and justify nationalism? These questions have been heatedly debated in recent years, especially in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on independence, and remain topical amid continuing campaigns for more autonomy and calls for a post-Brexit “indyref2.”  However, postcolonialism cannot be reduced to politics: cultural concerns are equally important. Focusing on the first centuries of the British Unions, Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination also offers a general introduction to the emerging field of postcolonial Scottish studies, assessing both its potential and limitations in order to promote further interdisciplinary dialogue. Accessible to readers from various backgrounds, the book combines overviews of theoretical, social, and cultural contexts with detailed case studies of literary and nonliterary texts. The main focus is on internal divisions between the anglophone Lowlands and traditionally Gaelic Highlands. Central to the ‘internal colonialism’ debate, these divisions also play a crucial role in Scottish–English relations. This study shows how the image of Scotland’s Gaelic margins changed under the influence of two simultaneous developments: the emergence of the modern nation state and the rise of overseas colonialism. Both sparked intense debates over ethnic hierarchies, progress and development, cultural intermixture, exploitation and resistance. Examples are drawn from novels, travel writing, poetry, political and administrative documents, writings by missionaries and educators, historiography, journalism, and anthropology. Continue reading “Book Announcement: Silke Stroh, Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination” →

Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Television and Serial Adaptation

Routledge, 2017

220 pages, 28 B/W illustrations

As American television continues to garner considerable esteem, rivalling the seventh art in its “cinematic” aesthetics and the complexity of its narratives, one aspect of its development has been relatively unexamined. While film has long acknowledged its tendency to adapt, an ability that contributed to its status as narrative art (capable of translating canonical texts onto the screen), television adaptations have seemingly been relegated to the miniseries or classic serial. From remakes and reboots to transmedia storytelling, loose adaptations or adaptations which last but a single episode, the recycling of pre-existing narrative is a practice that is just as common in television as in film, and this text seeks to rectify that oversight, examining series from “M*A*S*H” to “Game of Thrones”, “Pride and Prejudice to Castle”.

See https://www.routledge.com/Television-and-Serial-Adaptation/Wells-Lassagne/p/book/9781138696358 where about 20 pages of the book can be read.

Suzanne Bray (ed.), Dimensions of Madeleine L’Engle : New Critical Approaches

McFarland, Jefferson NC, 2017

Table of contents

Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Michel Naumann (eds.), Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema

Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017

This book investigates the millennial history of the Indian subcontinent. Through the various methods adopted, the objects and moments examined, it questions various linguistic, literary and artistic appropriations of the past, to address the conflicting comprehensions of the present and also the figuring/imagining of a possible future. 

The volume engages with this general cultural condition, in relation both to the subcontinent’s current “synchronic” reality and to certain aspects of the culture’s underlying diachronic determinations. It also reveals how the multiple heritages are negotiated through the subcontinent’s long-term sedimentational history. It scrutinizes both conservative interpretations of heritage and a possibly incremental enrichment, and the additional possibility of a mode of appropriation open to a dialectic of creative destruction, in which the patrimonial imperative is challenged, leaving room for processes of renewal and rejuvenation.

The collection is organized around four major topics: Orientalism, addressed by way of the Tamil Epic Manimekalai, through the evocation of the Hastings Circle and views on a possible Hindu-Muslim unity sketched out by Sayyid Ahmed Khan; modernism in Indian and Burmese texts written in English; pictorial art, through a consideration of the work of some modern and contemporary Indian artists and British Asian and Indian film directors; and, finally, the current state of a body of critical thinking on gender. Continue reading “Book Announcement: Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema” →

Marina Cano, Jane Austen and Performance

Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

eBook ISBN 978-3-319-43988-4
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43988-4
Hardcover ISBN 978-3-319-43987-7

This is the first exploration of the performative and theatrical force of Austen’s work and its afterlife, from the nineteenth century to the present. It unearths new and little-known Austen materials: from suffragette novels and pageants to school and amateur theatricals, passing through mid-twentieth-century representations in Scotland and America. The book concludes with an examination of Austen fandom based on an online survey conducted by the author, which elicited over 300 responses from fans across the globe. Through the lens of performative theory, this volume explores how Austen, her work and its afterlives, have aided the formation of collective and personal identity; how they have helped bring people together across the generations; and how they have had key psychological, pedagogical and therapeutic functions for an ever growing audience. Ultimately, this book explains why Austen remains the most beloved author in English Literature.

Details: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319439877

Alexandra Poulain, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play

Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017

eBook ISBN 978-1-349-94963-2
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-349-94963-2

This book discusses Irish Passion plays (plays that rewrite or parody the story of the Passion of Christ) in modern Irish drama from the Irish Literary Revival to the present day. It offers innovative readings of such canonical plays as J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, W. B. Yeats’s Calvary, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire, as well as of less well-known plays by Padraic Pearse, Lady Gregory, G. B. Shaw, Seán O’Casey, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett and David Lloyd. Challenging revisionist readings of the rhetoric of “blood sacrifice” and martyrdom in the Irish Republican tradition, it argues that the Passion play is a powerful political genre which centres on the staged death of the—usually male—protagonist, and makes visible the normally invisible violence perpetrated both by colonial power and by the postcolonial state in the name of modernity. Continue reading “Book Announcement – Alexandra Poulain, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play” →

Annie Ramel, The Madder Stain: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy

Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi, June 2015

ISBN13: 9789004293403
E-ISBN: 9789004296626 (e-book)         

The “madder stain” imprinted on Tess d’Urberville’s arm is part of a motif which runs through Hardy’s fiction. Similar to Barthes’s punctum shooting out of the studium, the stain is a place where the Real erupts, a blind spot that eludes interpretation. In the diegesis of the tragic novels, it is a surplus object whose intrusion disrupts reality and spells disaster. This book attempts to approach that unknowable kernel of jouissance by using Lacan’s concepts of object-gaze and object-voice—sometimes revisited by Žižek.

The stain has a vocal quality: it is silence audible. In a world where sound cannot reverberate for lack of a structural void, voice is by necessity muted, stuck in the throat. Hence the peculiar quality of Tess’s voice, a silent feminine cry that has retained something of the lost vocal object. The sound of silence is what Hardy’s poetic prose allows us to hear.