Book Announcement: Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown

Title: Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities.
Edited by: Heather Alberro, Emrah Atasoy, Nora Castle, Rhiannon Firth, Conrad Scott.
Publisher: Routledge.
ISBN 9781032385914.

This edited collection, which is situated within the environmental humanities and environmental social sciences, brings together utopian and dystopian representations of pandemics from across literature, the arts, and social movements.

Featuring analyses of literary works, TV and film, theater, politics, and activism, the chapters in this volume home in on critical topics such as posthumanism, multispecies futures, agency, political ecology, environmental justice, and Indigenous and settler-colonial environmental relations. The book asks: how do pandemics and ecological breakdown show us the ways that humans are deeply interconnected with the more-than-human world? And what might we learn from exploring those entanglements, both within creative works and in lived reality? Brazilian, Indian, Polish, and Dutch texts feature alongside classic literary works like Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year (1722) and Matheson’s I Am Legend(1954), as well as broader takes on movements like global youth climate activism. These investigations are united by their thematic interests in the future of human and nonhuman relationships in the shadow of climate emergency and increasing pandemic risk, as well as in the glimmers of utopian hope they exhibit for the creation of more just futures.

This exploration of how pandemics illuminate the entangled materialities and shared vulnerabilities of all living things is an engaging and timely analysis that will appeal to environmentally minded researchers, academics, and students across various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.

About the editors:

Heather Alberro is a Senior Lecturer in Global Sustainable Development in the Department of History, Heritage and Global Cultures, Nottingham Trent University. She also serves as co-convenor for the Political Studies Association’s (PSA) environmental politics specialist group and as a member of the PSA’s Executive Committee.

Emrah Atasoy, an Associate Professor of English, is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (EUTOPIA-SIF COFUND) of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), working in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Nora Castle is currently a Lecturer at the University of Bonn. She received her PhD in 2023 from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK, where she also completed an Early Career Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study.

Rhiannon Firth is a Lecturer in Sociology of Education at IoE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. She co-leads the MA modules Sociology of Education and Gender, Sexuality and Education, and is Program Leader for the MA in Sociology of Education.

Conrad Scott, PhD, is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, and is an Individualized Study Tutor for the University of Athabasca’s Honours English course “The Ecological Imagination,” where he holds a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship

Endorsement statements

“Fully globalized, immediately connected, yet still radically unequal in resources and protections, humanity has now become aware of itself as a species in a new, more urgent way: when pathogens and environmental disruptions strike, how can past experiences and their representations provide perspective, balance, and hope? This book provides answers.” (James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA)

This book is a collection of diverse and passionately engaged explorations of the way we live now. It is imbued both with a sense of the traumas of (post)apocalypse and a hope that human and non-human species can find ways to survive into futures that are not simply continuations of a present scarred by pandemics, extinctions, and the eco-injustices of global capital. The essays here are international in scope, multiplex in their critical methodologies, and comprehensive in their coverage. They provide resources for thinking about how to move into futures in which, through this “breakdown,” we take our non-anthropocentric place as one of the many species co-existing in an ecosystem that encompasses all life on the planet.” (Veronica Hollinger, Editor, Science Fiction Studies, and Professor Emerita of Cultural Studies, Trent University, Canada)

“As the introduction describes, this timely book emerged out of a dark and precarious contemporary moment, in the world and in the field of utopian studies. By bringing together this collection of cutting-edge studies by such a diverse mix of scholars addressing one of the most disruptive and destructive events of recent times, the editors have delivered an insightful and impactful counterpoint to official and normative invitations to despair and capitulate. This volume is itself an act of utopian annunciation in the face of official denunciation. Read it, hope, and act.” (Tom MoylanProfessor Emeritus in the School of English, Irish, and Communication, and member of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick, Ireland)

More: Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown

The book and/or individual chapters can be downloaded via the following link: Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown

Book Announcement: Dogmas in Literature and Literary Missionary

Title: Dogmas in Literature and Literary Missionary: Text, Reader and Critique
Edited by: Önder Çakırtaş
Publisher: Vernon Press
Publication date: October 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64889-695-8

Literature does have an aspect that drags the readers, habitually burying them in its pages and blindly attaching them to itself. Blind devotion stems from the factors that are effective in determining the readers’ faith. Theories of literature, similarly, might bring about the generation of blind adherence and dogmatic approaches. This book explores the existence of dogma in literature and some cult texts and writers and how dogmas in literature are conveyed to various audiences as a mission by some literary readers, experts, and academics.

Generally, dogma is a word related mostly to religion. In this frame, Mathew Arnold’s ‘Dogma in Religion and Literature’ is of great importance as far as religion is concerned. However, there are dogmas in every field, literature being no exception. Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote stupendous works that turned out to be well-known, and in 1928, she delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, where women were once not allowed, that formed the basis for the celebrated ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). Roland Barthes’ 1967 ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (‘The Death of the Author’) essay might be another text that some of its literary readers have developed a dogmatic commitment to.

In addition to revealing how dogma finds its place in literature, this book also discusses how literary writers and readers often unwittingly embrace ‘literary missionary.’ Focusing on the dogmatic elements of literature and the dogmatized literary theory and criticism through cult works of various authors, the book offers a striking and interesting contribution to literary theory and criticism and literature readings.

More: https://vernonpress.com/book/1777

Book Announcement: Edward Bond: Bondian Drama and Young Audience

Title: Edward Bond: Bondian Drama and Young Audience
Edited by: Ugur Ada
Publisher: Vernon Press
Publication date: August 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64889-700-9

The book upholds the importance of theatre for young audiences in today’s world, pointing specifically to Edward Bond’s latest plays, primarily written for young people, starting in the 1990s. Various studies conducted by researchers from different countries highlight the political, social, and cultural history of theatre for children and its aesthetic and educational functions. The diversity of researchers underscores the glowing international appraisals of Edward Bond’s plays, which have been translated into different languages and performed worldwide. The study’s section on Bond’s theoretical background analyzes the theatrical concepts applied by the experienced playwright over the course of his prolific writing career. Implications based on Bondian Drama provide researchers, performers, theatre companies, and audiences with new insights.

Prof. Dr. Juan de Dios Torralbo Caballero
Department of English and German Studies
University of Córdoba, Spain

Edward Bond: Bondian Drama and Young Audience focuses on one of the most influential playwrights of Britain, Edward Bond, and his plays for young audiences. The chapters examine the theatrical and pedagogical prospects of the plays on young people which have been mostly staged since 1990s, throughout the globe.

The issues covered in this book involve interdisciplinary studies such as theatre, pedagogy, ethics, children, culture, politics, among others. These topics have crucial importance for the production of plays for young audiences. Apart from this, the book focuses on Bondian Drama and its relation with the dramatic child, involving most of his plays for young audiences. The authors in this volume examine theatrical and pedagogical backgrounds of the plays, discussing critical issues, by questioning the specialities of Bondian drama and present future implications of this for young audiences. This volume presents substantial and elaborate information on crucial issues, and enable detailed discussions from various perspectives on theatre.

More details: https://vernonpress.com/book/1764

Book Series Announcement

Forthcoming Series: Global Historical Fictions

In what way do historical fictions shape our sense of history and for what purpose?
Defining historical fictions as encompassing many media forms, the series fosters an
interest in the impact of popular historical forms, and challenges the continuing Western
dominance in studies of historical fictions.

Series Editors: Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, University of Iceland, Iceland, Jerome de Groot,
University of Manchester, UK, Dorothea Flothow, University of Salzburg, Austria,

Siobhan O’Connor, Holy Cross College Bury, UK, and Stephanie Russo, Macquarie University, Australia

https://brill.com/page/hifi/

Book Announcement: “A wretchedness to defend”: Reading Beckett’s Letters, by Erika Mihálycsa

Title: “A wretchedness to defend”: Reading Beckett’s Letters 
Author: Erika Mihálycsa (Babeș-Bolyai University
Cluj-Napoca / Kolozsvár, Romania)
Publisher: University of Debrecen Press
Series: HJEAS Books 
Date of publication: 2022
ISBN: 978-963-615-047-1

Open-access e-book: https://dupress.unideb.hu/hu/termek/a-wrechedness-to-defend-e-book/

“A wretchedness to defend”: Reading Beckett’s Letters is an in-depth study of the correspondence of Samuel Beckett, selected and published by Cambridge University Press between 2009 and 2016. The volume treats the letters as inroads to Beckett’s poetics, stressing that, apart from their value as key documents to the Beckett canon, these are of a literary quality consubstantial with the output of one of the most radical modern writers. Reading Beckett’s pronouncements on works of literature and art, his first-hand accounts of grappling with his own writerly material, as well as his—invariably reserved—clarifications to theater-makers, translators, and interpreters of his work, in the context of his published fiction and plays and in light of recent advances in archival Beckett studies, the present book focuses on Beckett’s sustained self-education in literature, the visual arts, and philosophy, which imbricates his writerly choices, his lifelong commitment to critical reading, as well as his dilemmas in the practice of writing, self-translating, and theatrical performance. It points at the multiple ways in which this vast and many-faced correspondence reveals previously unknown contexts, over- and undertones of the work, and illuminates the processes of knowledge and “unknowing” on which Beckett’s singular aesthetics of impoverishment, of the low, of finitude, of ethical blank writing and achievement lessness is premised. Given its multiple foci on Beckett the reader, the self-translator, and the self director, the book is of potential interest to Beckett researchers, scholars working in the field of modernism and translation studies, as well as readers of Beckett.

“‘A wretchedness to defend’: Reading Beckett’s Letters” is the first book-length study to take the full measure of Samuel Beckett’s correspondence. As Mihálycsa’s assured writing highlights, this multilingual correspondence provides an essential insight into Beckett’s life and work. Along the way, profound insights into one of literature’s greats are yoked to recent developments in Beckett Studies, which has emerged as a leading sub-discipline in the study of modern literature. For scholars of Beckett Studies, and indeed modern literature more generally, this monograph is an assured guide to the wit, insight, and stoicism offered in Beckett’s letters.” 

—Matthew Feldman, editor of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’ (2020) and author of Falsifying Beckett: Essays on Archives, Philosophy and Methodology in Beckett Studies (2015), and Beckett’s Books (2006) 

L’Epoque Conradienne

L’Epoque Conradienne, the academic review of the French Société Conradienne, invites papers (normally 5000 to 8000 words) on all aspects of Joseph Conrad’s writings.

The articles published in L’Epoque Conradienne will be submitted to blind peer-reviews.

Published yearly by Pulim (Presses Universitaires de Limoges), the journal is indexed in EBSCOhost.Papers should be sent to the general editor: nathalie.martiniere@unilim.fr or nmartiniere@gmail.com

L’Epoque Conradienne vol. 43
Energy in Conrad and Hardy

Nathalie Martinière & Peggy Blin-Cordon eds. (+ introduction), 
Limoges: Pulim, 2022, 116 pp.
ISBN10 : 2-84287-854-2
ISBN13 : 9782842878542

The age of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad saw the discovery of many new forms of energy: steam, gas and electricity contributed to reshaping the environment as well as the social and economic organization of the world. How did these new energies compete or interfere with older ones, like those of the human body and of nature in general? And how did the two writers accommodate, or render in prose or verse the power of these new energies, the fascination/repulsion for their chemical/physical impulses? Aside from pure epistemology, can the notion of energy help us read the two authors differently?

This volume contains papers given in the panel “Energy in Conrad and Hardy” during the 15th ESSE International Conference held online (Lyon, France) on 01-02 September, 2021. 

Table of contents
In Memoriam – Claude Maisonnat (1945-2019)

Introduction 

– I – Energy 

  • Dynamis and Energeia in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes 
    Yann THOLONIAT
  • Degeneration and regeneration in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent 
    Catherine DELESALLE-NANCEY
  • “There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal”: New Energies and the Crisis of Adventure in Conrad’s Insular Fiction.
    Julie GAY
  • Energy and “the stillness of the stones” in Tess of the d’Urbervilles
    Annie RAMEL
  • “Trimming”, Fellatio and Cross-Dressing: Sexual Innuendo and Subversive Energy in Thomas Hardy’s “The Distracted Preacher” 
    Jane THOMAS

– II – Varia 

  • Defending Duplicity: Reading Against Writing in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” 
  • Ludmilla VOITKOVSKA
  • « Falk » : un proto-Koh-ring
    Patrick TOURCHON

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, edited by John G. Peters, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, Broadview Press, 2019, 240 p.P
Price: 18 euros (+ shipping fees) 

The volume may be ordered from:

Nathalie Martinière
Société Conradienne française – FLSH
39E rue Camille Guérin
87036 Limoges Cedex
nathalie.martiniere@unilim.fr

Book Announcement: Cécile Cosculluela, “The English Verb Equation”

Title: The English Verb Equation – An Easy Six-Step Logic to Get Your Verb Forms Right
Author: Cécile Cosculluela, Ph.D. (University of Pau, France)
Publisher: ESL Academy
Date of publication: 2022 (April)

Link to the book online (paperback, hardcover, and ebook): https://www.amazon.fr/English-Verb-Equation-Six-Step-Logic-ebook/dp/B09ZPW3TM6/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1653391299&sr=8-1

How to get your verb forms right in English?
By understanding the simple and fundamental logic inherent in all verb forms.

This book shows that any time we put a verb in a sentence, we intuitively follow a basic six-step process that can be referred to as the English Verb Equation. It consists of a short sequence of operators that combine to create all possible verb forms in English. The Equation is simple because it is logical, and it is fundamental because it is at the core of any verb form. Once we know what the Equation is, we know for sure whether any of the verb forms we produce is correct or not, and it also gives us the keys to turning any incorrect verb form into a correct one. Applying the Equation is all it takes: either the verb form matches it, or we make it match it by following the steps.

The English Verb Equation is the fruit of more than two decades of research and practical applications with students of E.S.L. (English as a Second Language) in French Universities. It has been designed with and for those language learners who want to get clarity on how to give a form to a verb in order to produce only correct verb forms. It is also a didactic tool devised for teachers and professors of E.S.L. who lead their students towards understanding how to deal with verbs. Indeed, the Equation is a tool that exposes at a glance the simple logic behind any verb form in English, thereby offering a synoptic overview of the creation of any possible verb phrase. It is an easy-to-grasp fundamental logic summed-up in a holistic six-step formula that presides over the creation of finite verb phrases in English.

The English Verb Equation is ready for you to master your verb forms! Are you ready for it?

The English Verb Equation is book 1 of an English verb triad of books.
Book 2: The English Verb Formulas
Book 3: The English Verb Matrix

For further information, contact Cecile Cosculluela at semeiolinguistics@gmail.com
and watch her videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7Lbn96dGFgOsicCRuGva1Q/playlists

Book Announcement – Digital Genres in Academic Knowledge Production and Communication

Digital Genres in Academic Knowledge Production and Communication
Perspectives and Practices

By María José Luzón and Carmen Pérez-Llantada

 

Finally a definitive guide to academic genres online! Covering an impressive range of digital practices, this insightful and inspiring book masterfully demonstrates the connection between the affordances of digital media and the exigences of scientific communication.

– Christoph A. Hafner, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

 This book presents an overview of the wide variety of digital genres used by researchers to produce and communicate knowledge, perform new identities and evaluate research outputs. The book explores what researchers can do with these genres, what meanings they can make and what language(s) they deploy in carrying out all these practices.

 María José Luzón is Senior Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her research interests include genre analysis, digital genres, academic discourse, and English for Academic Purposes.

Carmen Pérez-Llantada is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her research interests include genre analysis, English for Academic Purposes, academic writing, and rhetoric and composition.

 Get 75% off when you order on our website before 31st March with code DGAKPC75https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781788924719.

Book Announcement – Analyzing Multimodality in Specialized Discourse Settings

Analyzing Multimodality in Specialized Discourse Settings

Innovative Research Methods and Applications

Veronica Bonsignori, Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli, Denise Filmer (Eds.)

Contemporary society has witnessed radical changes in the field of communications in terms of how messages and meanings are disseminated. Digitalization and the Internet have signalled an exponential rise in the circulation of multimodal texts in which different semiotic resources are orchestrated together to construct meaning in all areas of social life, across languages and cultures, and in diverse specialized discourse domains. This has foregrounded the need to examine the semiotic functions, affordances, and issues at stake in a range of multimodal discourse forms, while simultaneously highlighting the importance of critical multimodal literacy in audiences and learners.

This volume develops and extends pioneering research on the intersection between multimodality and specialized discourse. Eight newly commissioned studies offer innovative perspectives on multimodal research methodologies and applications in a variety of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) contexts for practitioners and scholars alike. The volume offers a glimpse at future directions in this dynamic and ever-evolving area of investigation focusing on the synergy between verbal and non-verbal modes of communication in the digital age. Each chapter explores an original area of application: academic, economic, scientific, marketing, legal, medical, political, and tourism. The contributors approach multimodality from a range of theoretical and methodological viewpoints including synchronic and diachronic corpus-based and corpus-aided studies, critical discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics. Analytical tools such as multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, multimodal transcription, and multimodal annotation software capable of representing the interplay of different semiotic modes – speech, intonation, direction of gaze, facial expressions, gesturing, and spatial positioning of interlocutors – are employed. The diversity of research strands contained in the volume illustrates just some of the vast areas of multimodal knowledge dissemination that are still unmapped. As a cornerstone of communication, multimodality needs exploring in all its facets. These contributions aim to further that cause.  

ISBN: 978-1-64889-103-8

https://vernonpress.com/book/1128

Book Announcement – Jane Austen and William Shakespeare

Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance,

Edited by Marina Cano & Rosa García-Periago

Palgrave, 2019

This volume explores the multiple connections between the two most canonical authors in English, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. The collection reflects on the historical, literary, critical and filmic links between the authors and their fates. Considering the implications of the popular cult of Austen and Shakespeare, the essays are interdisciplinary and comparative: ranging from Austen’s and Shakespeare’s biographies to their presence in the modern vampire saga Twilight, passing by Shakespearean echoes in Austen’s novels and the authors’ afterlives on the improv stage, in wartime cinema, modern biopics and crime fiction. The volume concludes with an account of the Exhibition “Will & Jane” at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which literally brought the two authors together in the autumn of 2016. Collectively, the essays mark and celebrate what we have called the long-standing “love affair” between William Shakespeare and Jane Austen—over 200 years and counting.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction: Jane and Will, the Love Story,
Marina Cano and Rosa García-Periago                       

Part 1: History, Contexts and Criticism

Chapter 2: Jane Austen as ‘Prose Shakespeare’: Early Comparisons,
Joanne Wilkes

Chapter 3: William Shakespeare and Jane Austen: Biographical Challenges,
Robert Bearman

Chapter 4: Shakespeare and Austen Translated,
Marie Nedregotten Sørbø

Chapter 5: Jewels, Bonds and the Body: Material Culture in Shakespeare and Austen,
Barbara Benedict

Part 2: Intertextual Connections

Chapter 6: Is it ‘a marriage of true minds’? Balanced Reading in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,
Lynda Hall

Chapter 7: ‘As sure as I have a thought or a soul’: The Protestant Heroine in Shakespeare and Austen,
Claire McEachern

Chapter 8: Tyrants, Lovers, and Comedy in the Green Worlds of Mansfield Park and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Inger S. B. Brodey

Chapter 9: Forbidden Familial Relations: Echoes of Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII and Hamlet in Austen’s Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility,
Glenda Hudson

Part 3: Theatre, Film and Performance

Chapter 10: Shylock’s turquoise ring: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park and the Exquisite Acting of Edmund Kean,
Judith Page

Chapter 11: Austen and Shakespeare: Improvised Drama,
Marina Cano

Chapter 12: Shakespeare, Austen and Propaganda in World War II,
Rosa García-Periago

Chapter 13: Screening Will and Jane: Sexuality and the Gendered Author in Shakespeare and Austen Biopics,
Lisa Starks

Part 4: Popular Culture

Chapter 14: Austen and Shakespeare, Detectives,
Lisa Hopkins

Chapter 15: In the Pursuit of Love: Twilight, Jane and Will,
Heta Pyrhönen

Chapter 16: Curating Will & Jane,
Janine Barchas and Kristina Straub

Chapter 17: Afterword,
Mark Thornton Burnett

More about the volume

Book Announcement: The ‘Desegregation’ of English Schools

Olivier Esteves, The ‘Desegregation’ of English Schools: Bussing, Race and Urban Space, 1960s-1980s

Manchester University Press, 2018

  • Format: Hardcover
  • ISBN: 978-1-5261-2485-2
  • Pages: 240
  • Price: £80.00
  • Published Date: December 2018
  • BIC Category: Sociology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / General, Multicultural Education, Society & social sciences / Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, Ethnic Studies, Humanities / Social & cultural history

Dispersal, or ‘bussing’, was introduced in England in the early-1960s after white parents expressed concerns that the sudden influx of non-Anglophone South Asian children was holding back their own children’s education. It consisted in sending busloads of mostly Asian children to predominantly white suburban schools in an effort to ‘spread the burden’ and to promote linguistic and cultural integration. Although seemingly well-intentioned, dispersal proved a failure: it was based on racial identity rather than linguistic deficiency and ultimately led to an increase in segregation, as bussed pupils were daily confronted with racial bullying in dispersal schools. This is the first ever book on English bussing, based on an in-depth study of local and national archives, alongside interviews with formerly-bussed pupils decades later.

Olivier Esteves is Professor of British Studies at the University of Lille, France.

Table of contents:

Introduction
1 “To allay people’s fears on numbers”: the introduction of dispersal in Southall
2 Improvisation in high places? Setting the national framework for bussing
3 “Before it gets out of hand”: the introduction of dispersal in Bradford
4 Reluctant cities: how London and Birmingham said no to dispersal
5 Dispersing in diverse places: how the other L.E.A.s fared
6 Taking the bullying by the horns: the emergence of resistance against bussing
7 Babylon by bus: the quotidian experience of being bussed
Conclusion
Index

Book Announcement: Women on the Move

Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing
Edited by Silvia Pellicer-Ortín, Julia Tofantšuk

 

Published by Routledge
266 pages
Hardback: 9781138321991
eBook (VitalSource) : 9780429452291

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
Disturbing Transitions: Critical Inner Landscapes of Migration, Jill Lewis
Introduction: The Female Body and Self in the Glocal: Plights and Opportunities for Contemporary Diasporic Women, Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and Julia Tofantšuk

SECTION 1: Unbelonginess and Displacement in the Diaspora: Finding a Voice Through Narrative
1 Ceìdric Courtois: The Travelling Bodies of African Prostitutes in the Transnational Space in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009)
2 Merve Sarikaya-Şen: A Traumatic Romance of (Un)Belonginess: NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names,

SECTION 2: Globality, Locality and Cosmpolitanism
3 Beatriz Pérez Zapata: Dancing Across Nations: The Transnational and the Glocal in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time,
4 María Rocío Cobo-Piñero: Taiye Selasi and the Afropolitan Daughters of the Diaspora,

SECTION 3: Defining Feminine Spaces: Home, Self, Identity and Food
5 Chiara Battisti and Sidia Fiorato: Corinne Bigot; “By Way of Their Fingers”: Making Sense of Self and Home in Selected Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

6 Chiara Battisti and Sidia Fiorato: In the Kitchen with Monica Ali: Flavouring Gender and Diaspora

SECTION 4: Femininity, Spatiality and Liminality
7 Maria Amor Barros-del Río: Recalling Female Migration in Contemporary Irish Novels: An Intersectional Approach

8 Selen Aktari-Sevgi: Liminality and Affective Mobility in Anne Enright’s The Green Road

9 Julia Tofantšuk: Movement, Places and Knotted History in Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English

SECTION 5: Crossing Borders: Female Bodies and Identities in Transit
10 Paul Rüsse and Maialen Antxustegi-Etxarte: Travelling the US-Mexican Border, Challenging Chicanidad

11 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia: Under the Skin of British History: Bodies in Transit in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

12 Silvia Pellicer-Ortín: Short Stories on the Move: Mapping Memory and Constructing the (Jewish) Diasporic Female Self in Michelene Wandor’s False Relations

Index

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín is a Lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Julia Tofantšuk is Associate Professor of British Literature and curator of Liberal Arts in Humanities programme at Tallinn University, Estonia.

Book Announcement: Artangel and Financing British Art

Charlotte Gould, Artangel and Financing British Art: Adapting to Social and Economic Change

Routledge

154 pages, 35 B/W Illus.

The Artangel Trust has been credited with providing artists with all the money and logistics they need to create one-off dream projects. An independent art commissioning agency based in London, it has operated since 1985 and is responsible for producing some of the most striking ephemeral and site-specific artworks of the last decades, from Rachel Whiteread’s House to Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave. Artangel’s existence spans three decades, which now form a coherent whole in terms of both art historical and political periodisation. It was launched as a reaction to the cuts in funding for the visual arts introduced by the Thatcher government in 1979 and has since adapted in a distinctive way to changing cultural policies. Its mixed economic model, the recourse to public, private and corporate funds, is the result of the more general hybridisation of funding encouraged by successive governments since the 1980s and offers a contemporary case study on broader questions concerning the specificities of British art patronage. This book aims to demonstrate that the singular way its directors have responded to the vagaries of public funding and harnessed new national attitudes to philanthropy has created a sustainable independent model, but also that it has been reflected more formally, in their approach to site. The locational art produced by the agency has indeed mirrored new distinctions between public and private spaces, it has reflected the social and economic changes the country has gone through and accompanied the new cultural geographies shaping London and the United Kingdom. Looking into whether their funding model might have had a formal incidence on the art they helped produce and on its relation to notions of publicness and privacy, the study of Artangel gives a fresh insight into new trends in British site-specific art.

Charlotte Gould is Assistant Professor of British Studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, France.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Post-Consensus Cultural Policies and the Hybridisation of Funding: A British Model
2. Artangel, Producing Art in the Post-Consensus Age
3. The Public Art of Artangel
4. Dissemination, the New Sites of Art
Conclusion

Book Announcement: Fictions of Home

Martin Mühlheim, Fictions of Home: Narratives of Alienation and Belonging, 1850-2000

Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten (SAA), Vol. 143

2018, 384 Pages
€[D] 78,00
ISBN 978-3-7720-8637-3
eISBN 978-3-7720-5637-6

This study aims to counter right-wing discourses of belonging. It discusses key theoretical concepts for the study of home, focusing in particular on Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic contributions. The book also maintains that postmodern celebrations of nomadism and exile tend to be incapable of providing an alternative to conservative, xenophobic appropriations of home.

In detailed readings of one film and six novels, a view is developed according to which home, as a spatio-temporal imaginary, is rooted in our species being, and as such constitutes the inevitable starting point for any progressive politics.

”[A] thoroughly impressive, productive and useful work. [… T]he writing is admirably lucid and engaging.” – Randall Stevenson, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, University of Edinburgh

”[E]ach chapter is insightful and [… the] use of a very wide range of theorists to provide different angles of vision is deftly and impressively handled.” – Pam Morris, author of Realism (New Critical Idiom series) & Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism

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Book Announcement: Standardising English

Standardising English: Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language

Edited by Linda Pillière, Wilfrid Andrieu, Valérie Kerfelec, Diana Lewis (Université d’Aix-Marseille, France)

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print Publication year 2018
Online publication date: March 2018
Online ISBN: 9781108120470

Table of contents

Contents pp v-vi
List of Figures, Maps and Tables pp vii-viii
List of Contributors pp ix-xi
Acknowledgements pp xii-xii

Part I – Norms and Margins: Ideology and Concepts pp 1-62
1 – Norms and Margins of English pp 3-2: Linda Pillière, Wilfrid Andrieu, Valérie Kerfelec, Diana Lewis
2 – Approaching Norms and Margins on Different Levels: Going beyond the Standard/Non-Standard Divide pp 22-42: Sandrine Sorlin
3 – Prescriptive Grammar and the Rationalist Cultural Model of Standardisation pp 43-62: Natalia Guermanova

Part II – Norms and Margins: A Historical Perspective pp 63-190
4 – Norms and Rules in the History of Grammar: French and English Handbooks in the Seventeenth Century pp 65-88: Valérie Raby, Wilfrid Andrieu
5 – The End of Toleration? Language on the Margins in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English: Language pp 89-105: Lynda Mugglestone
6 – Eighteenth-Century Pronouncing Dictionaries: Reflecting Usage or Setting Their Own Standard? pp 106-126: Véronique Pouillon
7 – Setting a Standard: Authors and Sources in the OED pp 127-143: Charlotte Brewer
8 – Conflicting Linguistic Norms in the Letters of Virginian Soldiers during the American Civil War pp 144-170: Gaëlle Le Corre
9 – Correcting English: Josephine Turck Baker (1873–1942) and the Early American Usage Guide Tradition pp 171-190: Viktorija Kostadinova

Part III – Norms and Margins: Moving into the Twenty-First Century pp 191-276
10 – The Grammatical Margins of Class pp 193-212: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
11 – Concepts of Correctness and Acceptability in British English: Exploring Attitudes of Lay People pp 213-233: Carmen Ebner
12 – Maori English in Maori Literature: Standardising the Margin into a Norm pp 234-250
13 – Imposing a Norm: The Invisible Marks of Copy-Editors pp 251-276: Linda Pillière

Author Index pp 277-281
Subject Index pp 282-286

Book Announcement: The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh

Sneharika Roy, The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh

The book

Bridging classical and contemporary scholarship, The Postcolonial Epic places the epic, a form traditionally marginalised in postcolonial criticism, at the heart of the post-imperial construction of the imagined community. It introduces two major comparative concepts—political epic and postcolonial epic—in order to re-evaluate the post-Hegelian conception of epic as a discursively stable expression of the national totality. The political epics of Valmiki, Virgil, and their successors are recast as more unsettled entities, in which an avowed national politics promoting a culture’s “pure” origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from “other” cultures. This paradox allows the book’s chiasmatic argument to come into view: while political epic employs a hybrid poetics of migration to express a monocultural politics of nation (a contradiction it must disavow), postcolonial epic allows the genre to come full circle. It deploys a migrating poetics of intertextuality to articulate a transnational politics of migration (a complementary homology it openly advertises).

Prefigured by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and exemplified by the works of Derek Walcott and Amitav Ghosh, postcolonial epic compounds the tensions already present in political epic and makes the tradition more amenable to contemporary explorations of the profoundly disruptive nature of colonialism. The Postcolonial Epic foregrounds key postcolonial developments in the genre, including a shift from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation.

The table of contents

Introduction: from classical to postcolonial epic

  1. Rallying the tropes: the language of violence and the violence of language
  2. “History in the future tense”: genealogy as prophecy
  3. “The artifice of eternity”: ekphrasis as “an-other” epic

Conclusion: resistant nostalgia

The author

Sneharika Roy is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at The American University of Paris. She is a contributor to MLA volume on Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh and to the encyclopedic project DELI (Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Littératures de l’Inde).

Book Announcement: Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín (eds.), Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature

Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

294pp.

ISBN: 978-3-319-61758-9,
ISBN (eBook): 978-3-319-61759-6

Description

The essays that make up the collection delve into both the treatment of memory in literature and the view of literature as a medium of memory, paying special attention to major controversies attending the representation and (re)construction of individual, cultural and collective memories in literary narratives in English published from 1990 to the present. Focusing on texts written by authors from diverse backgrounds —Great Britain, South-Korea, the USA, Cuba, Australia, Burma, as well as Native-American Indian and African-American writers— this book attempts to explore the multifarious representational strategies used by contemporary writers so as to textualise memory and its friction areas through literary practices. The contributors to the collection analyse a good range of memory frictions —in connection with melancholic mourning, immigration, diaspora, genocide, perpetration and victimhood, dialogic witnessing, memorialisation practices, inherited traumatic memories, murder, sexual abuse, prostitution, etc.— by making use of various disciplines —such as psychoanalysis, ethics, politics, space theories, postcolonial studies, narratology, feminism and gender studies, critical studies in food and culture— resulting in a volume that is genuinely contemporary and committed to cross-cultural ethical engagement.

Contents

Introduction: Memory Frictions: Conflict-Negotiation-Politics. María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

Part I: Experimentation and Genre: Formal Memory Frictions

  • The Powers of Vulnerability: The Restorative Uses
of Elegy. Jean-Michel Ganteau
  • Narrative Form, Memory Frictions and the Revelation
of Traumatic Secrets in Toni Morrison’s Home. Susana Onega
  • The Zigzag Trajectory through Time of Colum
McCann’s TransAtlantic. Sandra Singer

Part II: Collective Tensions and the Politics of Remembrance

  • Public Art and Communal Space: The Politics of Commemoration in Amy Waldman’s The Submission. Paula Martín-Salván
  • A Korean “Apocryphal” Island, Once the Shore, by Paul
Yoon. Marc Amfreville
  • False Memories, False Foods: Eating, Cooking,
Remembering in Tastes like Cuba by Eduardo Machado. Nieves Pascual Soler

Part III: The Haunting Presence of the Holocaust: Multidirectional, Transgenerational and Memorial Struggles

  • The Holocaust in the Eye of the Beholder: Memory in
Carmel Bird’s The Bluebird Café. Bárbara Arizti
  • Lore, or the Implicated Witness: Rachel Seiffert’s
Postmemory Work. Susanne Baackmann
  • “No Redress but Memory”: Holocaust Representation
and Memorialization in E.L. Doctorow’s City of God. María Ferrández San Miguel

Part IV: Mapping Memories, Spatial F(r)ictions and Troubled Identities

  • Re-Mapping the Trauma Paradigm: The Politics
of Native American Grief in Louise Erdrich’s “Shamengwa”. Silvia Martínez-Falquina
  • Remembering the Way Back Home: The Role of Place
in Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting. Dolores Herrero
  • Negotiating Traumatic Memories in Louise Erdrich’s
The Round House: White Man’s Law vs. Native Justice
and Tradition. Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz

Conclusion. Robert Eaglestone

Editors

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro is  Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Zaragoza (Spain).

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín is Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology in the Faculty of Education of the University of Zaragoza (Spain).

Further details

http://www.palgrave.com/la/book/9783319617589
http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319617589

Book Announcement: Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema

Marianne Kac-Vergne, Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema

Publisher: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, London

Series: Library of Gender and Popular Culture
Hardback
ISBN: 9781780767482
Publication Date: 18 Dec 2017
Number of Pages: 256
Height: 216
Width: 138
Illustrations: 25 bw integrated

If science fiction stages the battle between humans and non-humans, whether alien or machine, who is elected to fight for us? In the classics of science fiction cinema, humanity is nearly always represented by a male, and until recently, a white male. Spanning landmark American films from Blade Runner to Avatar, this major new study offers the first ever analysis of masculinity in science fiction cinema. It uncovers the evolution of masculine heroes from the 1980s until the present day, and the roles played by their feminine counterparts. Considering gender alongside racial and class politics, Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema also situates filmic examples within the broader culture. It is indispensable for understanding science fiction and its role in contemporary cultural politics.

About the author:

Marianne Kac-Vergne is Lecturer at the Universite de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France, where she teaches courses in American cultural history at graduate and undergraduate levels. Her research focuses on gender and genre in American cinema, and she has published and presented on masculinity and femininity in science fiction, romantic comedy and western films.

Reviews:

‘A must read about gender politics in popular culture, this is a revealing and original historical study about constructed male identities in the flourishing genre of science fiction. Marianne Kac-Vergne eloquently coins key developments in the depiction of (hyper)masculinity in Hollywood blockbusters and traces the 1980s heroes with bulging muscles and hard bodies to the twenty-first century- sci-fi-species equipped with clever minds and a heart. The only staple: women stay on the sidelines while hegemonic masculinity rules. In the current political climate Kac-Vergne teaches us invaluable new insights to engage with the ideas of race and gender in mainstream film’ – Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Professor, Department of Communication, Central Connecticut State University

‘Marianne Kac-Vergne’s Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future is a brilliant analysis of contemporary science-fiction cinema. It will appeal to academics and students in film studies, gender studies, and cultural studies alike: its smart contextualizations, subtle commentary of intertexts and astute close readings, combined with strong intersectional analyses of the masculinity in these well-known films will prompt re-viewing in another light. Broader audiences will find this is a highly enjoyable read, with a dose of wit and wry humor. This is truly a must-read for anyone who watches, studies, or indeed, makes science fiction films today’. – Monica Michlin, Professor of Contemporary American Studies, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier

Book Announcement: Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre

Anne Etienne and Thierry Dubost (eds.), Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre: Populating the Stage

Palgrave-Macmillan

ISBN 978-3-319-59710-2
301 pages

This book addresses the notion posed by Thomas Kilroy in his definition of a playwright’s creative process: ‘We write plays, I feel, in order to populate the stage’. It gathers eclectic reflections on contemporary Irish theatre from both Irish theatre practitioners and international academics. The eighteen contributions offer innovative perspectives on Irish theatre since the early 1990s up to the present, testifying to the development of themes explored by emerging and established playwrights as well as to the (r)evolutions in practices and approaches to the stage that have taken place in the last thirty years.
This cross-disciplinary collection devotes as much attention to contextual questions and approaches to the stage in practice as it does to the play text in its traditional and revised forms. The essays and interviews encourage dialectic exchange between analytical studies on contemporary Irish theatre and contributions by theatre practitioners.

Anne Etienne is Lecturer in Modern Drama at University College Cork, Ireland. She has published widely on theatre censorship in twentieth-century England, and is the main author of Theatre Censorship: from Walpole to Wilson (2007). She is currently expanding her work on Arnold Wesker. Her research in contemporary Irish theatre is devoted to Corcadorca Theatre Company.

Thierry Dubost is Professor of Literatures in English at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie, France. He is the author of Struggle, Defeat or Rebirth: Eugene O’Neill’s Vision of Humanity (1997) and The Plays of Thomas Kilroy (2007). He has co-edited a number of volumes on Irish drama and culture

Book Announcement: Two Elizabethan Treatises on Rhetoric

Guillaume Coatalen, Two Elizabethan Treatises on Rhetoric: The Foundacion of Rhetorike by Richard Reynolds (1563) and A Brief Discourse of Rhetorike by William Medley (1575)

Brill, 2017

ISBN13: 9789004322301
E-ISBN: 9789004356344

Sixteenth century Elizabethan treatises on rhetoric in the vernacular are relatively rare. Guillaume Coatalen offers annotated editions of Richard Reynolds’s The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), which has not been edited since the 1945 facsimile edition, and of William Medley’s unknown Brief Discourse on Rhetoricke which survives in a single manuscript dated 1575. While Reynolds’s work is an English adaptation of Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata and a preparation for Thomas Wilson’s influential Arte of Rhetoricke (1560), Medley’s is broader in scope and contains the only full treatment of periodic prose in English in the period. Both works are essential to understand how Elizabethan rhetoric in the vernacular evolved, in particular in aristocratic circles, and its links with Continental developments, notably German.

Biographical note

Guillaume Coatalen, Ph.D (2002), University of Cergy-Pontoise (France), is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance English literature with a strong interest in manuscripts. He co-edited with Carlo Bajetta and Jonathan Gibson, Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Readership

Specialists working on Renaissance rhetoric and more specifically sixteenth century English rhetoric. Historians researching Puritan discourses and Elizabethan court culture.

Table of contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Sigla and Abbreviations

Introduction

Richard Reynolds, The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563)

William Medley, A Brief Discourse of Rhetorike (1575), Cecil Papers MS 238/6

Bibliography
Index Nominum
Index Rerum

Book Announcement: Joseph Conrad and the Voicing of Textuality

Claude Maisonnat, Joseph Conrad and the Voicing of Textuality

Published by Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press, Lublin

Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York
June 2017
ISBN: 9788377849309
416 Pages
Format: Hardcover

Joseph Conrad and the Voicing of Textuality offers an original approach to Conrad’s work rooted in linguistics and psychoanalytic theory. Claude Maisonnat provides fresh insight into the poetics of textuality by introducing the concept of textual voice, as opposed to the traditional conceptions of authorial voice and narrative voice. Understood as the main vector of poeticity in a text, textual voice is an offshoot of the Lacanian object-voice trimmed to fit a literary context. It enables the reader to uncover deeply concealed motivations and perceive unsuspected connections to the biographical background of the texts. At the same time, it offers new ways of structuring close reading and opens vistas into the mysteries of creation. Maisonnat gives insightful readings of Conrad’s best-known and less widely read works while developing a theoretically rich framework to tackle the notions of style and voice in literature.

This book is volume 26 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wieslaw Krajka.

Claude Maisonnat is professor emeritus at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. He has published widely on Conrad’s works, including a book on Lord Jim.

 

Book Announcement: Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 1876–1937

Rebecca Rogers and Myriam Boussahba-Bravard (eds.), Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 1876–1937

© 2018 – Routledge

286 pages | 17 B/W Illus.
ISBN: 1138636053

This book argues for the importance of bringing women and gender more directly into the dynamic field of exposition studies. Reclaiming women for the history of world fairs (1876-1937), it also seeks to introduce new voices into these studies, dialoguing across disciplinary and national historiographies.

From the outset, women participated not only as spectators, but also as artists, writers, educators, artisans and workers, without figuring among the organizers of international exhibitions until the 20th century. Their presence became more pointedly acknowledged as feminist movements developed within the Western World and specific spaces dedicated to women’s achievements emerged.

International exhibitions emerged as showcases of “modernity” and “progress,” but also as windows onto the foreign, the different, the unexpected and the spectacular. As public rituals of celebration, they transposed national ceremonies and protests onto an international stage. For spectators, exhibitions brought the world home; for organizers, the entire world was a fair.

Women were actors and writers of the fair narrative, although acknowledgment of their contribution was uneven and often ephemeral. Uncovering such silence highlights how gendered the triumphant history of modernity was, and reveals the ways women as a category engaged with modern life within that quintessential modern space—the world fair.

Rebecca Rogers is Professor in the History of Education at the Université Paris Descartes, France.

Myriam Boussahba-Bravard is Professor in British Civilization at the Université Paris Diderot, France.

Book announcement:

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier and Isabelle Brasme (eds.), The Humble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts

 

Description: Through its take on ‘the humble’, this volume attempts to reveal the depth and philosophical relevance of literature, its ethical and political dimension as well as its connection to life. Because it can be associated with social class, religion, psychology or ethics, the notion of ‘the humble’ lends itself to diverse types of studies. The papers collected in this volume argue that in the course of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, artists and writers have revisited the term ‘humble’ and, far from treating it as a simple motif, have raised it to the status of an aesthetic category. This category can first foster a better understanding of fiction, poetry, painting, and their representation of precarious lives through various genres and modes. It may also draw attention to neglected or depreciated humble novels or art forms that developed from the Victorian to the contemporary period, through the Edwardian and the modernist eras. Finally, it helps revise assumptions about the literature and art of the period and signals to a poetics of the humble. The works of art examined here explore the humble as a possible capacity and ethical force, a way of being and acting.

Contents:

Introduction: Isabelle Brasme, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier

Humble Art Forms

  • Laurence Roussillon-Constant: Artful Humility: A Pre-Raphaelite Ideal?
  • Sophie Aymes: Autographic Wood Engraving: Modernist D. I. Y.
  • Claudia Tobin: ‘The Humbleness of all his Objects’: Cézanne, Still Life, and Modern Writers

Aestheticizing Religious Humility

  • Stéphane Sitayeb: From Humbleness to Humiliation: Physical Losses and Spiritual Gains in The Hill of Dreams, by Arthur Machen
  • Shirley Bricout: The Humble Touch of the Good Samaritan in D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod
  • José Mari Yebra: The Humble Side of Motherhood in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary

Gendering the Humble

  • Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz: The Humble, Gender and the Local in Recent British and Irish Narratives
  • Susana Onega: Lesbian Invisibility and the Politics of Representation of the Lady and the Humble Servant in Sarah Waters’ Affinity

Precariousness

  • Angela Locatelli: ‘The Humble/d’ in Literature and Philosophy: Precariousness, Vulnerability, and the Pragmatics of Social Visibility
  • Corina Stan: A Ship of Fools: Precarious Lives in 1660s / 1980s England
  • Silvia Pellicer-Orti : Writing and Loving: Strategies to Overcome Humbleness in Lynne Reid Banks’ Children at the Gate

Self-effacement

  • Pascale Tollance:  From Humiliation to Humility: Swift’s Aesth/et(h)ics of Self-Effacement in The Light of Day
  • Xavier LeBrun: Leaving Jacob Room: Narratorial Humility in Jacob’s Room
  • Aude Haffen: “In a tactful, impersonal way, we have become quite intimate”: Christopher Isherwood’s Humble Persona and Inoperative Narratives in Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
  • Adeline Arniac: ‘We can’t start again. We can end again.’ Humble Inchoation in a Selection from Harold Pinter’s Memory Plays

The British Humble Abroad 

  • Leila Haghshenas: The Aesthetics of Humility in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle
  • Laurent Mellet: The British Humble Abroad: Humanism in Practice in E. M. Forster’s First Novel (Where Angels Fear to Tread) and Jonathan Coe’s Latest (Expo 58)

Further details: https://www.pulm.fr/index.php/9782367812489.html

Book Announcement: Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ed. Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont & Charlotte Coffin

Manchester University Press, 2017

304 pages, ISBN: 978-1-5261-1768-7

DESCRIPTION: This volume proposes new insights into the uses of classical mythology by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on interweaving processes in early modern appropriations of myth. Its 11 essays show how early modern writing intertwines diverse myths and plays with variant versions of individual myths that derive from multiple classical sources, as well as medieval, Tudor and early modern retellings and translations. Works discussed include poems and plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. Essays concentrate on specific plays including The Merchant of Venice and Dido, Queen of Carthage, tracing interactions between myths, chronicles, the Bible and contemporary genres. Mythological figures are considered to demonstrate how the weaving together of sources deconstructs gendered representations. New meanings emerge from these readings, which open up methodological perspectives on multi-textuality, artistic appropriation and cultural hybridity/

Contents

Introduction: ‘Ariachne’s broken woof’ – Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin

  1. Shakespeare’s mythological feuilletage: A methodological induction – Yves Peyré
  2. The non-Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion: Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield – Tania Demetriou
  3. This realm is an empire’: Tales of origins in medieval and early modern France and England – Dominique Goy-Blanquet
  4. Trojan shadows in Shakespeare’s King John – Janice Valls-Russell
  5. Venetian Jasons, parti-coloured lambs and a tainted wether: Ovine tropes and the Golden Fleece in The Merchant of Venice – Atsuhiko Hirota
  6. Fifty ways to kill your brother: Medea and the poetics of fratricide in early modern English literature – Katherine Heavey
  7. ‘She, whom Jove transported into Crete’: Europa, between consent and rape – Gaëlle Ginestet
  8. Subtle weavers, mythological interweavings and feminine political agency: Penelope and Arachne in early modern drama – Nathalie Rivère de Carles
  9. Multi-layered conversations in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage – Agnès Lafont
  10. Burlesque or neoplatonic? Popular or elite? The shifting value of classical mythology in Love’s Mistress– Charlotte Coffin
  11. Pygmalion, once and future myth: Instead of a conclusion – Ruth Morse

Index

Details: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526117687/

Editors

  • Janice Valls-Russell is employed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France, where she coordinates early modern research projects
  • Agnès Lafont is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France
  • Charlotte Coffin is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne, France

Book Announcement: Empires and Revolutions

Empires and Revolutions: Cunninghame Graham and his Contemporaries, edited by Carla Sassi and Silke Stroh

Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, August 2017

ISBN 978-1-908980-25-0

192 pages
Paperback
£ 12.95  /  € 17.95  /  $ 19.95

The European age of empires launched a process of capitalist globalisation that continues to the present day. It is also inextricably linked with the spread of revolutionary discourses, in terms of race, nation, or social class: the quest for emancipation, political independence, and economic equality. Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936), in both his life and his oeuvre, most effectively represents the complex interaction between imperial and revolutionary discourses in this dramatic period. Throughout his life he was an outspoken critic of injustice and inequality, and his appreciation of the demands and customs of diverse territories and contrasting cultures were hallmarks of his life, his political ideas, and his writing. These essays explore the expression of these ideas in the works of Cunninghame Graham and of other Scottish writers of the period.

Contents

  • Introduction (by Carla Sassi & Silke Stroh)
  • Chapter 1: R. B. Cunninghame Graham: Janiform Genius (by Cedric Watts)
  • Chapter 2: The Local and the Global: The Multiple Contexts of Cunninghame Graham
    (by John M. MacKenzie)
  • Chapter 3: Anti-Slavery Discourse in Three Adventure Stories by R. M. Ballantyne
    (by Jochen Petzold)
  • Chapter 4: Don Roberto on Doughty Deeds; or, Slavery and Family History in the Scottish Renaissance
    (by Michael Morris)
  • Chapter 5: Empire and Globalisation in John Francis Campbell’s My Circular Notes
    (by Jessica Homberg-Schramm)
  • Chapter 6: Nineteenth-Century Argentine Literature and the Writings of R. B. Cunninghame Graham
    (by Richard Niland)
  • Chapter 7: R. B. Cunninghame Graham and the Argentinean Angelito (by Jennifer Hayward)
  • Chapter 8: Opposing Racism and Imperialism: Isabella Fyvie Mayo’s search for literary space(s), 1880–1914 (by Lindy Moore)
  • Chapter 9: The Empire in Cunninghame Graham’s Parliamentary Speeches and Early Writings, 1885–1900 (by Lachlan Munro)
  • Chapter 10: White-Skinned Barbarians in Selected Tales by R. B. Cunninghame Graham
    (by John C. McIntyre)
  • Chapter 11: Violet Jacob on Capital Relation: Local and Global Flows of Privilege and (Im)mobility
    (by Arianna Introna)

Editors

  • Carla Sassi is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Verona
  • Silke Stroh is a lecturer in anglophone literature and cultural studies at Muenster University, Germany

Online information

http://asls.arts.gla.ac.uk/Empires_and_Revolutions.html