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Balancing Acts gathers together interviews and conversations between Gerald Dawe and a wide cast of interlocutors between 1995 and 2020. Drawn from exchanges on television and radio, print and online media, these conversations with fellow poets, critics, journalists, colleagues and friends, are a testament to Dawe's generous, open-hearted and open-minded approachability as a poet for whom the ‘artful way of making'poetry has always been informed by an attitude of just ‘getting on with it'. In the same way that memory, for him, is ‘not just about the past'but involves ‘a route into the present', these fascinating interviews and conversations provide an insight into the poet on the go, in the process of making unforgettable poetry happen.

As various critics have noted, the concept of memory was a topic of immense importance for the Victorians; be it in the form of remembrance, nostalgia, amnesia, or mourning. This is nowhere more evident than in the literature of the period where acts of memory provide the focal point in numerous Victorian literary texts. For the Victorians, it seems, the act of memory was indissociable from the art of literature. Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond engages with the interconnections that existed between literature and memory in the nineteenth century with nine lively, informative, and accessible essays written by a combination of established academics and up-and-coming scholars, as well as an “Afterword” by Professor Roger Ebbatson. The essays in this collection arise from an international conference held in Birmingham in 2007, which generated considerable academic interest and vibrant new work, and from selected papers a refined and considered collection has been produced. Discussing well-known literary figures, texts, and movements (as well as some less well-known), alongside key theoretical, psychological, and philosophical works, the essays in this collection offer a rich, stimulating, and diverse exploration of the concept of memory within (and at times beyond) the Victorian era.

American poets'theater emerged in the postwar period alongside the rich, performance-oriented poetry and theater scenes that proliferated on the makeshift stages of urban coffee houses, shared apartments, and underground theaters, yet its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Acts of Poetry shines a spotlight on poets'theater's key groups, practitioners, influencers, and inheritors, such as the Poets'Theatre, the Living Theatre, Gertrude Stein, Bunny Lang, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, Carla Harryman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Heidi R. Bean demonstrates the importance of poets'theater in the development of twentieth-century theater and performance poetry, and especially evolving notions of the audience's role in performance, and in narratives of the relationship between performance and everyday life. Drawing on an extensive archive of scripts, production materials, personal correspondence, theater records, interviews, manifestoes, editorials, and reviews, the book captures critical assessments and behind-the-scenes discussions that enrich our understanding of the intertwined histories of American theater and American poetry in the twentieth century.

In Acts of Modernity, David Buchanan reads nineteenth-century historical novels from Scotland, America, France, and Canada as instances of modern discourse reflective of community concerns and methods that were transatlantic in scope. Following on revolutionary events at home and abroad, the unique combination of history and romance initiated by Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) furthered interest in the transition to and depiction of the nation-state. Established and lesser-known novelists reinterpreted the genre to describe the impact of modernization and to propose coping mechanisms, according to interests and circumstances. Besides analysis of the chronotopic representation of modernity within and between national contexts, Buchanan considers how remediation enabled diverse communities to encounter popular historical novels in upmarket and downmarket forms over the course of the century. He pays attention to the way communication practices are embedded within and constitutive of the social lives of readers, and more specifically, to how cultural producers adapted the historical novel to dynamic communication situations. In these ways, Acts of Modernity investigates how the historical novel was repeatedly reinvented to effectively communicate the consequences of modernity as problem-solutions of relevance to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

This volume collects twenty of Lawrence Kramer's seminal writings on art song (especially Lieder), opera, and word-music relationships. All examine the formative role of culture in musical meaning and performance, and all seek to demonstrate the complexity and nuance that arise when words and music interact. The diverse topics include words and music, music and poetry, subjectivity, the sublime, mourning, sexuality, decadence, orientalism, the body, war, Romanticism, modernity, and cultural change. Several of the earlier essays have been revised for this volume, which also contains a preface by the author and a foreword by Richard Leppert. The volume should be essential reading for scholars, students, performing musicians, and other music-lovers interested in musicology, word-music relationships, cultural studies, aesthetics, and intermediality.

Writers facing death offer a rare glimpse into human mortality—they have the unusual opportunity to craft the closing chapter of their life stories. Final Acts explores memoirs of terminal illness, and shows a paradoxical pattern where the diagnosis of terminal illness evokes not despair, but a new freedom and richness in life. The memoirs analyzed—by Allon White, Harold Brodkey, Gillian Rose, and Derek Jarman—provide insight into the experience of radical contingency that an awareness of mortality brings. Tom Ratekin engages the concept of'traversing the fantasy,'elaborated by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, to argue that the new richness in life each of these memoirists'experiences arises from the abandonment of a particular fantasy that guided his or her earlier work—a fantasy that both protected and inhibited the memoirist. Freed from convention, these writers, while close to death, can reinterpret the stories presented in their earlier work, and gain new perspectives on their worlds and existence.

For the Middle Ages and Renaissance, meaning and power were created and propagated through public performance. Processions, coronations, speeches, trials, and executions are all types of public performance that were both acts and texts: acts that originated in the texts that gave them their ideological grounding; texts that bring to us today a trace of their actual performance. Literature, as well, was for the pre-modern public a type of performance: throughout the medieval and early modern periods we see a constant tension and negotiation between the oral/aural delivery of the literary work and the eventual silent/read reception of its written text. The current volume of essays examines the plurality of forms and meanings given to performance in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through discussion of the essential performance/text relationship. The authors of the essays represent a variety of scholarly disciplines and subject matter: from the “performed” life of the Dominican preacher, to coronation processions, to book presentations; from satirical music speeches, to the rendering of widow portraits, to the performance of romance and pious narrative. Diverse in their objects of study, the essays in this volume all examine the links between the actual events of public performance and the textual origins and subsequent representation of those performances.

Using a framework based on J. L. Austin's understanding of performative speech and Angela Esterhammer's work on how things are done with words in Milton's and Blake's poetry, this study provides an extended close reading of the speech acts of characters in Blake's epic poem Milton. With the exception of what we learn about in the part of the poem known as the Bard's Song, Blake's Milton is dedicated to providing an incredibly detailed account of the numerous facets of the instant of time immediately prior to apocalypse, an instant in which Milton is the protagonist, and Blake himself a participant. This study explores how in the poem sacred history proceeds towards and through the instant by means of the speech act. This extended commentary is intended for not just Blake scholars but also the common reader who wishes to approach Blake's brief epic for the first time. For scholars, this monograph offers a full account of a crucial but previously unexplored theme in the scholarship about Milton. For the common reader, it offers a comprehensive introduction to what Northrop Frye called ‘one of the most gigantic imaginative achievements in English poetry'.

Poems—specifically romantic poems, such as those by Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, and John Keats—link what goes unremembered in our reading to ethics. In'Tintern Abbey,'for example, Wordsworth finds in'little... unremembered... acts'the chance to hear the'still, sad music of humanity.'In The Poetics of Unremembered Acts, Brian McGrath shows that poetry's capacity to address its reader stages an ethical dilemma of continued importance. Situating romantic poems in relation to Enlightenment debate over how to teach reading, specifically debate about the role of poetry in the process of learning to read, The Poetics of Unremembered Acts develops an alternative understanding of poetry's role in education. McGrath also explores the ways poetry makes ethics possible through its capacity to pass along what we do not remember and cannot know about our reading.

Winner, 2022 Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana Dragunoiu reads Nabokov's fictional worlds as battlegrounds between an autonomous will and heteronomous passions, demonstrating Nabokov's insistence that genuinely moral acts occur when the will triumphs over the passions by answering the call of duty. Dragunoiu puts Nabokov's novels into dialogue with the work of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust; with Kantian moral philosophy; with the institution of the modern duel of honor; and with the European traditions of chivalric literature that Nabokov studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts allows Dragunoiu to advance an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of an author who viewed moral activity as an art, and for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to the freedom of the will.

Unlock the more straightforward side of Between the Acts with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf, which is set at the country house of Pointz Hall on the day of the annual village pageant, and shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. The pageant precipitates manifold dramas of passion among the audience and the play's director herself, and encourages reflections on the continuity between the primeval and the present, the range of parts people play, and the violent impulses behind British imperialism. Woolf is widely considered to be one of the most significant English-language writers of the 20th century; her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and Orlando, and the essays A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.Find out everything you need to know about Between the Acts in a fraction of the time!This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:•A complete plot summary•Character studies•Key themes and symbols•Questions for further reflectionWhy choose BrightSummaries.com?Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time.See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts brings together in one volume cutting-edge research that turns to recent findings in cognitive and neurobiological sciences, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines, to explore and understand more deeply various cultural phenomena, including art, music, literature, and film. The essays fulfilling this task for the general reader as well as the specialist are written by renowned authors H. Porter Abbott, Patrick Colm Hogan, Suzanne Keen, Herbert Lindenberger, Lisa Zunshine, Katja Mellman, Lalita Pandit Hogan, Klarina Priborkin, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Ellen Spolsky, and Richard Walsh. Among the works analyzed are plays by Samuel Beckett, novels by Maxine Hong Kingston, music compositions by Igor Stravinsky, art by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and films by Michael Haneke. Each of the essays shows in a systematic, clear, and precise way how music, art, literature, and film work in and of themselves and also how they are interconnected. Finally, while each of the essays is unique in style and methodological approach, together they show the way toward a unified knowledge of artistic creativity.

Speech Act Theory and Shakespeare delves deeper than linguistic ornamentation to illuminate the complex dynamics of thanking as a significant speech act in Shakespearean plays. The word “thanks” appears nearly 400 times in 37 Shakespearean plays, calling for a careful investigation of its veracity as a speech act in the 16th-century setting. This volume combines linguistic analysis to explore the various uses of thanks, focusing on key thanking scenes across a spectrum of plays, including All's Well That Ends Well, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, The Winter's Tale, and the Henriad. Shakespeare's works indicate the act of thanking to be more than a normal part of dialogue; it is an artistic expression fraught with pitfalls similar to those of negative speech acts. The study aims to determine what compels the characters in Shakespeare to offer thanks and evaluates Shakespeare's accomplishment in imbuing the word “thanks” with performance quality in the theatrical sphere. This work adds to our comprehension of Shakespearean plays and larger conversations on the challenges of language usage in theatrical and cultural settings by examining the convergence of gratitude with power dynamics, political intrigue, and interpersonal relationships, drawing on a multidisciplinary approach that includes pragmatics, philosophy, religion, and psychology.

Reading John through Johannine Lenses demonstrates that the model an interpreter chooses for examining the Gospel of John significantly impacts the resulting interpretation. The Fourth Evangelist uses key words in the prologue in order to guide the reader toward key moments in the gospel. Stan Harstine shows how four words— life, word, receive, and believe— converge at transition points in John 5, 12, and 17. Their close relationship is not random; rather, it guides the reader to recall what the Gospel has presented in the preceding section, providing a road map for understanding the narrative. By using interpretive models from both diachronic and synchronic methodologies, Harstine's comparison of traditional historical methods with more recent narrative and rhetorical methods demonstrates the wide disparity of results from prior approaches, thus accentuating the importance of reading the Fourth Gospel through the lenses it provides its readers.

Los prodigios de la vara y capitán de Israel es una de las comedias religiosas del dramaturgo Antonio Mira de Amescua. Se articula en torno al episodio bíblico de Moisés, contada en tono desenfadado aunque bajo la perspectiva de profundas raíces católicas de su autor y de su época.-

Los mártires del Japón es una comedia teatral del dramaturgo Antonio Mira de Amescua. De corte vagamente histórico, si bien con nombres ficticios, la trama se articula en torno a la expulsión de los misioneros católicos en Japón por parte del emperador Jisonén por temor a un levantamiento en su contra.-

Los celos de San José es una comedia teatral de corte religiosa del dramaturgo Antonio Mira de Amescua. Se basa en un episodio bíblico ubicado alrededor del nacimiento de Jesús: la puesta en conocimiento de San José de la situación de María, su intención primera de repudiar a su esposa en secreto, la revelación del ángel y la aceptación por parte de José de que será el padre de Jesús.-

Los pastores de Belén es una de las comedias religiosas del dramaturgo Antonio Mira de Amescua. Se articula en torno al episodio bíblico de la llegada de los pastores a Belén a adorar al niño Jesús, contada en tono desenfadado aunque bajo la perspectiva de profundas raíces católicas de su autor y de su época.-

Code-Choice and Identity Construction on Stage challenges the general assumption that language is only one of the codes employed in a theatrical performance; Sirkku Aaltonen changes the perspective to the audience, foregrounding the chosen language variety as a trigger for their reactions. Theatre is ‘the most public of arts', closely interwoven with contemporary society, and language is a crucial tool for establishing order. In this book, Aaltonen explores the ways in which chosen languages on stage can lead to rejection or tolerance in diglossic situations, where one language is considered unequal to another. Through a selection of carefully chosen case studies, the socio-political rather than artistic motivation behind code-choice emerges. By identifying common features of these contexts and the implications of theatre in the wider world, this book sheds light on high versus low culture, the role of translation, and the significance of traditional and emerging theatrical conventions. This intriguing study encompassing Ireland, Scotland, Quebec, Finland and Egypt, cleverly employs the perspective of familiarising the foreign and is invaluable reading for those interested in theatre and performance, translation, and the connection between language and society.

After the Modernist literary experiments of her earlier work, Virginia Woolf became increasingly concerned with overt social and political commentary in her later writings, which are preoccupied with dissecting the links between patriarchy, patriotism, imperialism and war. This book unravels the complex textual histories of The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts (1941) to expose the genesis and evolution of Virginia Woolf's late cultural criticism. Fusing a feminist-historicist approach with the practices and principles of genetic criticism, this innovative study scrutinizes a range of holograph, typescript and proof documents within their historical context to uncover the writing and thinking processes that produced Woolf's cultural analysis during 1931-1941. By demonstrating that Woolf's late cultural criticism developed through her literary experimentalism as well as in response to contemporary social, political and economic upheavals, this book offers a fresh perspective on her emergence as a cultural commentator in her final decade and paves the way for further genetic enquiries in the field.

Christ's Subversive Body offers a fascinating exploration of six historical examples of politically or culturally subversive usages of the body of Christ. Shining a light on the enabling potential of religious rhetoric, Solovieva examines how in moments of crisis or transition throughout Western history the body of Christ has been deployed in a variety of discourses, including recent neo- and theoconservative movements in the United States. Solovieva's survey includes the iconoclastic polemics of Epiphanius at the moment of struggles for supremacy between the Roman state and the Christian church, the mystical theologico-political alchemy of an anonymous treatise circulated at the Council of Constance, Lavater's counter-Enlightenment visions of the afterlife expressd through physiognomy, Dostoevsky's refashioning of ethical communities, Pier Paolo Pasolini's attempts to provoke the “scandal” of Jesus's mission once more in the modern world, and the elaboration of a political theology subordinating democratic dissent to the higher unity of a corporately conceived “unitary executive” in early twenty-first-century America. Solovieva presents her findings not as an entry into theological or Christological debates but rather as a study in comparative discourse analysis. She demonstrates how these uses of Christ's body are triggered by moments of epistemological, political, and representational crisis in the history of Western civilization.

From the exemplary to the notorious to the obscure, this comprehensive and innovative encyclopedia showcases the worthy women of early modern England. Poets, princesses, or pirates, the women of power and agency found in these pages are indeed worth knowing, and this volume will introduce many female figures to even the most established scholars in early modern studies. Rather than using the conventional alphabetical format of the standard biographical encyclopedia, this volume is divided into categories of women. Since many women will fit in more than one category, each woman is placed in the category that best exemplifies her life, and is cross referenced in other appropriate sections. This structure makes the book an interesting read for seasoned scholars of early modern women, while students need not already be familiar with these subjects in order to benefit from the text. Another unusual feature of this reference work is that each entry begins with some incident from the woman's life that is particularly exciting or significant. Some entries are very brief while others are extensive. Each includes a source listing. The book is well illustrated and liberally sprinkled with quotations of the time either by or about the women in the text.

The book introduces the reader into the world of mental perception of literary contents. Based on the research in modern semantics, functional stylistics and cognitive phonetics, it explores the way linguistic elements of a literary work cause readers to form a single perception shape identified as a cultural, literary or social stereotype.

This study analyzes an oral performance of the entire Gospel of Mark, with emphasis on involvement with characters and events, the emotional effects of such involvement, and how these processes maintain or shape the identity of those who hear the Gospel. Insights from cognitive poetics and psychonarratology are employed to illuminate the complex, cognitive processes that take place when audience members experience an oral performance of the Gospel. Consequently, this study expands previous research on the Gospel of Mark which was conducted on the basis of narrative criticism, orality criticism, and performance criticism by including cognitive aspects. Cognitive poetics and psychonarratology have to my knowledge not been extensively employed to illuminate an oral performance of the Gospel of Mark previously. This investigation provides: (1) An original, coherent theoretical and methodological framework; (2) An analysis of mechanisms which promote involvement with characters and events in the Markan narrative; (3) An examination of the prospective emotional effects of such involvement; (4) Reflections on the potential of these mechanisms with regard to identity maintenance or formation through cultural memory; (5) A cognitive poetic commentary on the entire Gospel of Mark.

On Pain of Speech tracks the literary rant, an expression of provocation and resistance that imagines the power to speak in its own name where no such right is granted. Focusing on the'politics of address,'Dina Al-Kassim views the rant through the lens of Michel Foucault's notion of the biopolitical subject and finds that its abject address is an essential yet overlooked feature of modernism. Deftly approaching disparate fields—decadent modernism, queer studies, subjection, critical psychoanalysis, and postcolonial avant-garde—and encompassing both Euro-American and Francophone Arabic modernisms, she offers an ambitious theoretical perspective on the ongoing redefinition of modernism. She includes readings of Jane Bowles, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Oscar Wilde, and invokes a wide range of ideas, including those of Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Jean Laplanche, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Examining some of the most iconic texts in English theatre history, including Titus Andronicus and The Changeling, this book, now in paperback with a new Preface, reveals the pernicious erasure of rape and violence against women in the early modern era and the politics and ethics of rehearsing these negotiations on the 20th and 21st century stages.

This book, first published in 1990, combines an introduction to speech-act theory as developed by J. L. Austin with a survey of critical essays that have adapted Austin's thought for literary analysis. Speech-act theory emphasizes the social reality created when speakers agree that their language is performative - Austin's term for utterances like:'we hereby declare'or'I promise'that produce rather than describe what they name. In contrast to formal linguistics, speech-act theory insists on language's active prominence in the organization of collective life. The first section of the text concentrates on Austin's determination to situate language in society by demonstrating the social conventions manifest in language. The second and third parts of the book discuss literary critics'responses to speech-act theory's socialisation of language, which have both opened new understandings of textuality in general and stimulated new interpretations of individual works. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics and literary theory.

Do our writings and our utterances reflect or describe our world, or do they intervene in it? Do they, perhaps, help to make it? If so, how? Within what limits, and with what implications? Contemporary theorists have considered the ways in which the languages we speak might be ‘performative'in just this way, and their thinking on the topic has had an important impact on a broad range of academic disciplines.In this accessible introduction to a sometimes complex field, James Loxley: offers a concise and original account of critical debates around the idea of performativity traces the history of the concept through the work of such influential theorists as J. L. Austin, John Searle, Stanley Fish, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Judith Butler examines the implications of performativity for fields such as literary and cultural theory, philosophy, performance studies, and the theory of gender and sexuality. emphasises the political and ethical implications that its most important theorists have drawn from the notion of performativity suggests ways in which major debates around the topic have obscured its alternative interpretations and uses. For students trying to make sense of performativity and related concepts such as the speech act, ‘ordinary language', and iterability, and for those seeking to understand the place of these ideas in contemporary performance theory, this clear guide will prove indispensable. Performativity offers not only a path through challenging critical terrain, but a new understanding of just what is at stake in the exploration of this field.

Women have always been the muses who inspire the creativity of men, but how do women become the creators of art themselves? This was the challenge faced by Latin American women who aspired to write in the 1920s and 1930s. Though women's roles were opening up during this time, women writers were not automatically welcomed by the Latin American literary avant-gardes, whose male members viewed women's participation in tertulias (literary gatherings) and publications as uncommon and even forbidding. How did Latin American women writers, celebrated by male writers as the'New Eve'but distrusted as fellow creators, find their intellectual homes and fashion their artistic missions? In this innovative book, Vicky Unruh explores how women writers of the vanguard period often gained access to literary life as public performers. Using a novel, interdisciplinary synthesis of performance theory, she shows how Latin American women's work in theatre, poetry declamation, song, dance, oration, witty display, and bold journalistic self-portraiture helped them craft their public personas as writers and shaped their singular forms of analytical thought, cultural critique, and literary style. Concentrating on eleven writers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, Unruh demonstrates that, as these women identified themselves as instigators of change rather than as passive muses, they unleashed penetrating critiques of projects for social and artistic modernization in Latin America.

A new history of manhood, race, and hierarchy in American childhoodLike Children argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American period. Camille Owens demonstrates that white men's power at the top of humanism's order has depended on those at the bottom. As Owens shows, it was childhood's modern arc—from ignorance and dependence to reason and rights—that structured white men's power in early America: by claiming that black adults were like children, whites naturalized black subjection within the American family order. Demonstrating how Americans sharpened the child into a powerful white supremacist weapon, Owens nevertheless troubles the notion that either the child or the human have been figures of unadulterated whiteness or possess stable boundaries.Like Children recenters the history of American childhood around black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts. Through the stories of black and disabled children spectacularized as prodigies, Owens tracks enduring white investment in black children's power and value, and a pattern of black children performing beyond white containment. She reconstructs the extraordinary interventions and inventions of figures such as the early American poet Phillis Wheatley, the nineteenth-century pianist Tom Wiggins (Blind Tom), a child known as “Bright” Oscar Moore, and the early-twentieth century “Harlem Prodigy,” Philippa Schuyler, situating each against the racial, gendered, and developmental rubrics by which they were designated prodigious exceptions. Ultimately, Like Children displaces frames of exclusion and dehumanization to explain black children's historical and present predicament, revealing the immense cultural significance that black children have negotiated and what they have done to reshape the human in their own acts.

Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain examines torture across the fiction, periodicals, and government documents of the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Placing acts of torture and words about torture in relation to changing definitions of citizenship and human rights, Katherine Judith Anderson argues that torture—as a technique of state terrorism—evolved in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism, combining the traditional definition of exceptional acts of cruelty with systemic, banal, or everyday violence. Analyzing canonical novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith alongside an impressive array of lesser-known fiction through the lenses of critical terrorism studies and political, legal, and phenomenological theory, Anderson rethinks torture as a mode of reclaiming an embodied citizenship and demonstrates how the Victorians ushered in our modern definition of torture. Furthermore, she argues that torture is foundational to Western modernity, since liberalism was, and continues to be, dependent on state-sanctioned––and at times state-sponsored—torture, establishing parallels between Victorian liberal thought and contemporary (neo)imperialism and global politics.

When twelve-year-old Jesse Pomeroy tortured seven small boys in the Boston area and then went on to brutally murder two other children, one of the most striking aspects of his case was his inability ever to answer the question of why he did what he did. Whether in court or in the newspapers, many experts tried to explain his horrible acts -- and distance the rest of society from them. Despite those efforts, and attempts since, the mystery remains.In this book, Dawn Keetley details the story of Pomeroy's crimes and the intense public outcry. She explores the two reigning theories at the time -- that he was shaped before birth when his pregnant mother visited a slaughterhouse and that he imitated brutal acts found in popular dime novels. Keetley then thoughtfully offers a new theory: that Pomeroy suffered a devastating reaction to a smallpox vaccination which altered his brain, creating a psychopath who revealed the human potential for brutality. The reaction to Pomeroy's acts, then and now, demonstrates the struggle to account for exactly those aspects of human nature that remain beyond our ability to understand.

The interdisciplinary essays in Showing Off, Showing Up examine acts of showing, a particular species of performance that relies on competition and judgment, active spectatorship, embodied excess, and exposure of core values and hidden truths. Acts of showing highlight those dimensions of performance that can most manipulate spectators and consumers, often through over-the-top heightening and skewing of presentation. Many forms of showing and of heightened performance, however, operate more enigmatically and covertly while still profoundly affecting the social world, even if our reactions to them are initially flippant or unconcerned because “it's just a show.” Examining a wide range of examples—from dog shows to competitive dancing to carnivals to striptease, the essays illuminate how such events variously foster competition, exaggerate a characteristic, and reveal hidden truths. There is as much to be learned about the power of showing through subtlety and underlying intentionality as through overt display. The book's theoretical introduction and 12 essays by leading scholars reveal how diverse, particularly efficacious genres of showing are theoretically connected and why they merit more concerted attention, especially in the 21st century.

This study investigates the overlaps between political discourse and literary and cinematic fiction, arguing that both are informed by, and contribute to, the cultural imaginary of terrorism. Whenever mass-mediated acts of terrorism occur, they tend to trigger a proliferation of threat scenarios not only in the realm of literature and film but also in the statements of policymakers, security experts, and journalists. In the process, the discursive boundary between the factual and the speculative can become difficult to discern. To elucidate this phenomenon, this book proposes that terror is a halfway house between the real and the imaginary. For what characterizes terrorism is less the single act of violence than it is the fact that this act is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a potential series, and that further acts are expected to occur. As turn-of-the-century writers such as Stevenson and Conrad were the first to point out, this gives terror a fantastical dimension, a fact reinforced by the clandestine nature of both terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. Supported by contextual readings of selected texts and films from The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent through late-Victorian science fiction to post-9/11 novels and cinema, this study explores the complex interplay between actual incidents of political violence, the surrounding discourse, and fictional engagement with the issue to show how terrorism becomes an object of fantasy. Drawing on research from a variety of disciplines, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism will be a valuable resource for those with interests in the areas of Literature and Film, Terrorism Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Trauma Studies, and Cultural Studies.

What makes good people capable of committing bad – even evil – acts? Few psychologists are as well-qualified to answer that question as Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor who was not only the author of the classic Stanford Prison Experiment – which asked two groups of students to assume the roles of prisoners and guards in a makeshift jail, to dramatic effect – but also an active participant in the trial of a US serviceman who took part in the violent abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the wake of the second Gulf War. Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect is an extended analysis that aims to find solutions to the problem of how good people can commit evil acts. Zimbardo used his problem-solving skills to locate the solution to this question in an understanding of two conditions. Firstly, he writes, situational factors (circumstances and setting) must override dispositional ones, meaning that decent and well-meaning people can behave uncharacteristically when placed in unusual or stressful environments. Secondly, good and evil are not alternatives; they are interchangeable. Most people are capable of being both angels and devils, depending on the circumstances. In making this observation, Zimbardo also built on the work of Stanley Milgram, whose own psychological experiments had shown the impact that authority figures can have on determining the actions of their subordinates. Zimbardo's book is a fine example of the importance of asking productive questions that go beyond the theoretical to consider real-world events.

Saba Mahmood's 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action. Mahmood's book is a study of women's participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East. Mahmood – a feminist social anthropologist with left-wing, secular political values – wanted to understand why women should become such active participants in a movement that seemingly promoted their subjugation. As Mahmood observed, women's active participation in the conservative Islamic revival presented (and presents) a difficult question for Western feminists: how to balance cultural sensitivity and promotion of religious freedom and pluralism with the feminist project of women's liberation? Mahmood's response was to conduct a detailed evaluation of the arguments made by both sides, examining, in particular, the reasoning of female Muslims themselves. In a key moment of evaluation, Mahmood suggests that Western feminist notions of agency are inadequate to arguments about female Muslim piety. Where Western feminists often restrict definitions of women's agency to acts that undermine the normal, male-dominated order of things, Mahmood suggests, instead, that agency can encompass female acts that uphold apparently patriarchal values. Ultimately the Western feminist framework is, in her evaluation, inadequate and insufficient for discussing women's groups in the Islamic revival.

As twentieth-century writers confronted the political violence of their time, they were overcome by rhetorical despair. Unspeakable acts left writers speechless. They knew that the atrocities of the century had to be recorded, but how? A dead body does not explain itself, and the narrative of the suicide bomber is not the story of the child killed in the blast. In the past, communal beliefs had justified or condemned the most horrific acts, but the late nineteenth-century crisis of belief made it more difficult to come to terms with the meaning of violence. In this major new study, Joyce Wexler argues that this situation produced an aesthetic dilemma that writers solved by inventing new forms. Although Symbolism, Expressionism, Modernism, Magic Realism, and Postmodernism have been criticized for turning away from public events, these forms allowed writers to represent violence without imposing a specific meaning on events or claiming to explain them. Wexler's investigation of the way we think and write about violence takes her across national and period boundaries and into the work of some of the greatest writers of the century, among them Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald.

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Monk: A Romance with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Monk: A Romance by Matthew Gregory Lewis, a Gothic tale which centres around Ambrosio, a monk who falls from grace and acts on his lustful desires. To satisfy his immoral urges, he consorts with the Devil and commits evil acts, making for a scandalous yet riveting read. Although highly controversial at the time of publication due to its sinful content, critics could not deny the genius of Lewis'writing and, despite it being labelled'blasphemous and lewd', readers flocked to buy it. Although Lewis wrote other works, these other achievements are all clouded by the enormous success of The Monk: A Romance, which is considered a classic example of Gothic literature. Find out everything you need to know about The Monk: A Romance in a fraction of the time!This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:•A complete plot summary•Character studies•Key themes and symbols•Questions for further reflectionWhy choose BrightSummaries.com?Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you in your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time.See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

The “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America's cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society's understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy. Murder Most Queer works to expose the forces that create the homophobic paradigm that imagines sexual and gender nonconformity as dangerous and destructive and to show how theater artists—and for the most part LGBT theater artists—have rewritten and radically altered the significance of the homicidal homosexual. Jordan Schildcrout argues that these figures, far from being simple reiterations of a homophobic archetype, are complex and challenging characters who enact trenchant fantasies of empowerment, replacing the shame and stigma of the abject with the defiance and freedom of the outlaw, giving voice to rage and resistance. These bold characters also probe the darker anxieties and fears that can affect queer lives and relationships. Instead of sentencing them to the prison of negative representations, this book analyzes the meanings in their acts of murder, confronting the real fears and desires condensed in those dramatic acts.

Looking at works by Carrie Mae Weems, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers, and Zora Neale Hurston, Claire Raymond uncovers a pattern of femininity constructed around representations of sadistic violence in American women's literature and photography from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dickinson's poetry is read through its relationship to the Southern Agrarian critics who championed her work. While the representations of violence found in Carrie Mae Weems's installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Morrison's Beloved, Dickinson's poetry, O'Connor's'A View of the Woods'and'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,'Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, McCullers'Ballad of the Sad Café, and Hurston's Mules and Men are diverse in terms of artistic presentation, all allude to or are set in the antebellum and Jim Crow South. In addition, all involve feminine characters whose subjectivity is shaped by the practice of seeing acts of violence inflicted where there can be no effective resistance. While not proposing an equivalence between representing violence in visual images and written text, Raymond does suggest that visual images of violence can be interpreted in context with written evocations of violent imagery. Invoking sadism in its ethical sense of violence enacted on a victim for whom self-defense and recourse of any kind are impossible, Raymond's study is ultimately an exploration of the idea that a femininity constructed by the positioning of feminine characters as witnesses to sadistic acts is a phenomenon distinctly of the American South that is linked to the culture's history of racism.

In The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England, Elizabeth Rivlin explores the ways in which servant-master relationships reshaped literature. The early modern servant is enjoined to obey his or her master out of dutiful love, but the servant's duty actually amounts to standing in for the master, a move that opens the possibility of becoming master. Rivlin shows that service is fundamentally a representational practice, in which the servant who acts for a master merges with the servant who acts as a master. Rivlin argues that in the early modern period, servants found new positions as subjects and authors found new forms of literature. Representations of servants and masters became a site of contact between pressing material concerns and evolving aesthetic ones. Offering readings of dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Thomas Dekker and prose fictions by Thomas Deloney and Thomas Nashe, Rivlin suggests that these authors discovered their own exciting and unstable projects in the servants they created.

Offering readings of nineteenth-century travel narratives, works by Tractarians, the early writings of Charles Kingsley, and the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, Devon Fisher examines representations of Roman Catholic saints in Victorian literature to assess both the relationship between conservative thought and liberalism and the emergence of secular culture during the period. The run-up to Victoria's coronation witnessed a series of controversial liberal reforms. While many early Victorians considered the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828), the granting of civil rights to Roman Catholics (1829), and the extension of the franchise (1832) significant advances, for others these three acts signaled a shift in English culture by which authority in matters spiritual and political was increasingly ceded to individuals. Victorians from a variety of religious perspectives appropriated the lives of Roman Catholic saints to create narratives of English identity that resisted the recent cultural shift towards private judgment. Paradoxically, conservative Victorians'handling of the saints and the saints'lives in their sheer variety represented an assertion of individual authority that ultimately led to a synthesis of liberalism and conservatism and was a key feature of an emergent secular state characterized not by disbelief but by a range of possible beliefs.

This book argues for a new articulation of the ways in which transgression is theorized in contemporary literature by Japanese women.Exploring the rhetorical and discursive mechanics of literary “bad girls” from fiction produced during the millennial turn (1990–2010), the book contends that women writers today deploy truant, unruly, restless, and aggressive female protagonists not to challenge the status quo but rather to reaffirm it. While Japanese women's fiction has long been invested in cultivating an uncomfortable politics of opposition through “unladylike” themes such as sex, sexuality, and violence, the book argues that today authors turn to such acts of defiance to quietly advocate for the primacy of Japanese social order. Showing how transgression has not only lost its political and disruptive valence in contemporary women's fiction, this book further reveals how discourses of dissent can be retooled to promote a conservative worldview.A fascinating literary analysis which reads Japanese literature in relation to the receding value of rebellion today, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese literature, gender, and cultural studies.

Asks how we can better understand a politics of refusalWriting a new story of Black politics, Jump emerges from the practice of enslaved Africans jumping overboard off their slavers'ships. Reading against the narrative that depoliticizes and denigrates the leaps of the enslaved as merely suicidal symptoms of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage, Sam C. Tenorio demonstrates how bringing these jumps to bear on the foundations of Black politics allows us to rethink a politics of refusal.In a period of increasing political mobilization against police brutality and mass incarceration, Jump attends to the layers of confinement that constitute the racial and gendered hierarchies of the antiblack world. Centering radical acts too often relegated to the periphery of Black politics, Tenorio proposes a Black anarchist politics of refusal that helps us to think dissent anew.Tracing iterations of the jump through the carceral wake of the slave ship, Tenorio explores the voyages of the Black Star Line in defiance of the bordered authority of the nation state, the Watts Rebellion of 1965 against the property relation of ghettoization, and Assata Shakur's abscondence from prison to Cuba. Ultimately, Tenorio argues that considering the jump as a progenitor of Black politics deepens and widens our conceptualization of the Black radical tradition and introduces a paradigm-shifting attention to Black anarchism.

Reveals the theatrical dimensions of civilian support for the revolutionary GI Movement of the 1960s-70sPerformance played a role both crucial and complicated in the antiwar activism of the 1960s and 1970s. As soldiers and civilian actors, activists, and celebrities worked together to end the Vietnam War, their theatrical acts of solidarity and resistance connected liberation struggles across the lines of race, gender, enlisted status, and nationality.F•ck The Army! offers the first, fully narrated history of the FTA, an antiwar variety show featuring Jane Fonda that played to tens of thousands of active-duty troops over the course of nine months in 1971. From its very conception, the civilian-led show was directed towards the project of making visible the growing antiwar movement organized by GIs, inspired by but also acting as a rebuttal to the increasingly out-of-touch USO tours presented by Bob Hope. Through an analysis of the FTA's tactical performances of solidarity and resistance, Lindsay Goss brings into view the theatrical dimensions of the GI movement itself, revealing it as representative of the revolutionary and theatrical politics and tactics of the period. The volume highlights how, due to the movement's subsequent historical erasure, a renewed anti-theatricality emerged from the 1960s and became a potent feature of contemporary political discourse.The author's deft methodological and analytic strategies, in tandem with her elegantly accessible style demonstrate how seemingly little-known performance practices can activate consequential understandings of what we thought we knew about the recent past. At the same time, she encourages essential conversations about pressing contemporary issues that demand our attention. At its core, F•ck The Army! reveals the fundamentally theatrical character of radical activism when it seeks to challenge the status quo.

Inside Tenement Time is the first comprehensive treatment of literary and cultural texts on surveillance in the Caribbean. Covering the long historical arc of the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, Inside Tenement Time uses Jamaica as a case study to examine moments of crisis and particular spaces, especially urban yard enclaves and their environs, in the Caribbean encounter with surveillance. Making the argument that the Caribbean situation reveals flexible hegemonies rather than provinces of exclusive control, the book demonstrates the countervailing force of sussveillance and spiritveillance, Afro-Indigenous variations on surveillance. Sussveillance and spiritveillance are exemplars of vernacular arts and sciences that operate at and within the frangible borders of state power, exposing the unique dynamics of surveillance in the region and marshalling the acts of imagination with which it contends. For example, the Smile Jamaica concert of 1976, headlined by reggae Superstar Bob Marley, and the reputedly US government-backed 2010 Tivoli Gardens incursion in West Kingston, both moments that have dramatic, even mythic residue in Caribbean and global memory, are among the real-life events brought into conversation with literary representations of this history.

Literature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavor to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us.The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpretation posed by specific literary texts and films, emphasising how our interpretive acts also entail ethical engagements. The book develops a ‘hermeneutics of (guarded) trust', which calls for attention to the agency of art without surrendering critical vigilance.Through a series of forays into theoretical texts, literary works and films, the book contributes to contemporary debates about critical practice and the cultural value. Interpretation, it suggests, is always fallible but it is also essential to our place in the world, and to the importance of the humanities.

'Time travels in divers paces with divers people.'Shakespeare's oft-quoted line contains a hidden ambiguity: not only do individual people experience time differently, but time travels in diverse paces when we are with diverse persons. The line articulates a contemporary understanding of subjective time: it is changed by interaction with our social environment. Interacting with other people—and even literary characters—can slow or quicken the experience of time. Interactive time, and the paradigm of enactive cognition in which it sits, calls for an expansion of traditional ideas of time in narrative. The first book-length study of interactive time in narrative, Catching Time explains how lived time and narrative time interpenetrate each other, so that the relational model of subjective time acts as a narrative function. Catching Time develops a novel, interdisciplinary framework, drawing on cognitive science, narratology, and linguistics, to understand the patterns of temporality that shape narrative.

This book explores desire through the work of a new generation of Japanese women writers, in response to the increased attention these writers have received following the release of their work in the English language.The contributions explore a wide range of theoretical approaches and psychoanalytic interpretations to'reading'a new generation of Japanese women writers'relationships to identity, sex/gender, and desire. Through dealing with female spaces, maternal roles, gendered bodies, or resistant speech acts, the book uncovers the overarching theme of desire – desire for language, touch, and recognition. Focusing on authors who have previously been underrepresented in English-language scholarship, the book highlights the diverse nature and the important synergies of writing by women in the last few decades. Addressing experimental and nonconforming authors whose works challenge gender and culture expectation as well as Orientalist myths, this will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Asian literature, Japanese culture, and Asian studies.

A user-friendly guide to reading, writing, and theorizing autobiographical texts and practices for students, scholars, and practitioners of life narrative The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore definitions of life narrative, probe issues of subjectivity, and outline salient features of autobiographical acts and practices. In this updated edition, they address emergent topics such as autotheory, autofiction, and autoethnography; expand the discussions of identity, relationality, and agency; and introduce new material on autobiographical archives and the profusion of “I”s in contemporary works. Smith and Watson also provide a helpful toolkit of strategies for reading life narrative and an extensive glossary of mini-essays analyzing key theoretical concepts and dozens of autobiographical genres. An indispensable exploration of this expansive, transnational, multimedia field, Reading Autobiography Now meticulously unpacks the heterogeneous modes of life narratives through which people tell their stories, from traditional memoirs and trauma narratives to collaborative life narrative and autobiographical comics.