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Zen, Meaning, and Craft in Jane Hirshfield's Poetry: Heartshoots is the first scholarly volume to be dedicated to the large body of work produced by North American Zen poet, Jane Hirshfield. The volume is co-authored by a Zen Buddhist scholar and a poetry scholar, who are both practising poets. Its five chapters cover format and structure; three fruitful approaches to the poetry; Zen and the problem of desire; Hirshfield's response to the more-than-human world and her warnings to humanity not to ignore the ecological crisis; belonging, loss, and the solace of poetry. The book portrays poetry as a “heartshoot” that can bridge the artificial divide between external and internal worlds and can draw forth compassion as well as delight. In Hirshfield's hands, it mobilises the considerable power of cognitive, verbal, and semantic surprise to lead the reader gently to new insights about the connectedness of all that is.

A must-have addition to the shelf for any parent hoping to introduce more inclusive books into the home, with 100+ essential titles for early readers through high schoolBrimming with the history and culture of Black America, this one-of-a-kind resource is delivered in a package that all children find irresistible: stories. Education expert Amber O'Neal Johnston—who homeschools her four children—offers masterfully curated booklists, sorted by age, for diving into the fullness of the African American cultural experience.Soul School books are must-have mirrors for Black children and priceless windows for others, but first and foremost, they're captivating stories. And while they're sure to hold a special place in the hearts of Black families, they are unequivocally and without hesitation for all children.In addition to the booklists, Johnston artfully weaves together knowledge of the past and awareness of the present by examining cultural values, historical highlights, and the power of storytelling while teaching families what to look for and how to enjoy prose, verse, and illustrations that celebrate Black American culture. Soul School offers the best children's, middle grade, and young adult books available today, each accompanied by discussion questions, activities, and related resource recommendations. Covering toddlers to teens and everyone in between, Soul School is an education for us all.

Freud and psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in the contemporary'entertainment'culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom—and against what?Julia Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. These figures, according to Kristeva, took part in a revolution against accepted notions of identity—of one's relation to others. She places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics, also offering an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion.

Two English-Language Translators of Jin Ping Mei examines English translations of the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei by translators from different historical periods within the Anglophone world.Drawing upon theoretical insights from translation studies, literary criticism, and cultural studies, the book explores the treatment of salient features of the novel in translation, including cultural representation, narratological elements, gender-specific motifs, and (homo)sexual themes. Through literary re-imagining and artistic re-creation, Egerton transforms a complex and sprawling narrative into a popular modern middlebrow novel, making it readily accessible within Western genres. Roy's interlinear and annotated translation transcends the mere retelling of a vivid story for its unwavering emphasis on every single detail of the original, becoming a portal to the Ming past. It stands as a testament to the significance of translation as a medium for understanding the legacy of the late Ming and the socio-cultural dynamics shaping that period in Chinese history.This book will be a useful reference for scholars and research students within the fields of literary translation studies and translated Chinese literature, particularly Ming- Qing fiction. The book will also appeal to students and researchers studying Jin Ping Mei's translation and reception in the West.

Stories silenced or sequestered by a century of mass displacement between Europe and the Middle East—recovered and retold at lastIn 1923, the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange uprooted and swapped nearly two million Christians and Muslims, “pacifying” the so-called Near East through ethnic partition and refugeehood. This imposition of borders not only uprooted peoples from their place in the world; it also displaced many of their stories from a place in world literature. In Literature's Refuge, William Stroebel recovers and weaves together work by fugitive writers, oral storytellers, readers, copyists, editors, and translators dispersed by this massive “unmixing” of populations and the broader border logic that it set in motion. Stroebel argues that two complementary forces emerged as a template for the Eastern Mediterranean's cultural landscape: the modern border, which reshuffled people through a system of filters and checkpoints; and modern philology, which similarly reshuffled their words and works. Philologists and publishers defined modern literature by picking apart, extracting, reformatting, or dispossessing refugee and diasporic texts across a racialized borderscape—a gray zone of semi-inclusion and semi-exclusion, semimobility and immobility.Stroebel reaches into the chinks and crannies of this borderscape to reconstitute the rich textual geography between Greek Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam, between Greek-script, Arabic-script, and Latin-script literary traditions at the edges of Europe and the Middle East. Doing so, he offers a new methodological toolkit for rewriting the modern borderscapes of world literature.

Why was mythology of vital importance for the romantics? What role did mythology play in their philosophical and literary work? And what common sources of influence inspired these writers across Britain and Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century? In this wide-ranging study, Owen Ware argues that the romantics turned to mythology for its potential to transform how we see ourselves, others, and the world. Engaging with authors such as William Blake, Friedrich Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ware shows why they believed that neither perception nor reason alone can sustain a vision of the unity of all things. A new mode of cognition is necessary, they claimed, one that revives the poetic origin of mythology and reveals our own mythmaking powers. Return of the Gods investigates the rise of mythology in the British and German traditions and the romantics'practices of reinterpreting old myths and inventing new ones. Their shared aim was nothing less than to elevate the human imagination to higher stages of self-development in which philosophy and poetry, as well as intellect and imagination, form an integrated whole. Far from calling us to return to the past, the romantics'work on mythology points us to a future where we can live in harmony with the personal, social, and natural worlds we inhabit. Owen Ware combines intellectual history with philosophical analysis and literary criticism to offer a bold reflection on why mythology mattered for the romantics--and why it still matters today.

Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Bruce Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity. Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, what we think of now as atrocities have not always invited indignation or been seen to violate moral norms. Venturing from the Bible to Zadie Smith, Robbins explores the literature of suffering, to show how, over time, abhorrence of mass violence takes shape. With it comes the emergence of a necessary element of cosmopolitanism: the ability to look at one's own nation with the critical eyes of a stranger. Drawing on a vast written archive and with penetrating insight, Robbins takes up such literary representations of violence as Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards'atrocities, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homero Aridjis's short novel Smyrna in Flames, and Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. These essential texts do more than simply testify to atrocious acts. In their literariness, they take the risk of contextualizing and relativizing, thereby extending beyond the legal paradigm of accusation. They recognize atrocity as a moral scandal about which something should be done and can be done, while they also place that scandal within a larger and more uncertain history.

Lucian's writings raise questions about the nature of reading and viewing the lives of others; this book explores these questions through close readings of Lucian's dialogues and stories.Lucian scholarship over the past decades has been dominated by terms like performance and personas, so this book asks simply: what happens when we are not performing? When we read or sit in the audience, we cannot perform for the world we are viewing. Nor can we act on our desires and beliefs, since we have no self in that viewed world to move around like an avatar. Is there anything left of us at such moments? As a satirist, Lucian explored these questions not through philosophical arguments but stories – a traveler who looks down on earth from the moon, a philosopher who retires to a contemplative life “as if high up in a theater”, a narrator who demands that a reader not believe anything he writes, and many more. Over the course of seven chapters, this book explores these questions of reading, performing, and the difference via detailed analyses of some of Lucian's best-known works: Hermotimus, Charon, Icaromenippus, Nigrinus, Rooster, True Stories, and others.Lucian on Reading, Performing, and the Difference is suitable for students and scholars of ancient Greek literature, Classics and the Humanities, particularly those interested in questions about Lucian and literary interpretation.

This book redirects attention to a truth largely ignored by recent criticism—that Shakespeare's excellence as a playwright is inextricable from his excellence as a poet. It explores the diverse means by which Shakespeare's poetry enriches his drama, illustrating how particular words in a particular order render his dialogue distinctive and create supreme literary and dramatic value. By examining many passages, long and short and from a variety of Shakespeare's plays—comedies, histories, tragedies, later plays—the author aids understanding of the poetic effects that make Shakespeare preeminent. His analyses, alert to textual variants and cruxes, are illuminated by comparisons: Shakespeare's early verse is compared with his later verse and samples of Shakespearean dialogue are compared with versions in later adaptations, in modernizations, and inferior quarto texts, as well as with contributions by his co-authors to collaborative plays. The contrasts throw into relief the surpassing vitality and expressiveness of Shakespeare's own language. Since the rhythmic vitality of Shakespeare's verse is essential to how and what it communicates, an appendix on the principles of iambic pentameter is included to support those aspects of the analyses that refer to acoustic subtleties.

This book focuses on Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian writer of the Greek language in the second century CE, and his engagement with contemporary debates regarding the form and register of language best suited to composing Greek literature in the Roman Empire. Many authors of the period advocated or practised writing in a revived version of Attic Greek, the dialect used in classical Athenian rhetoric, philosophy and drama of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. However, this book argues that Lucian distinguished himself from other writers, including those who also commented extensively on the linguistic dimensions of classical reception, through his self-aware, humorous approach to sociolinguistics. As Stifler demonstrates, the focal point of much of Lucian's satire is at the intersection of, on the one hand, vocabulary, syntax and usage, and on the other hand, cultural, racial and political identity – a space in which other authors also operate but which they seldom acknowledge. In Stifler's view, a crucial component of Lucian's satire is in fact sociolinguistic, constituting a complex but ultimately coherent ideology of Atticism expressed through multiple perspectives, or personae, and comprising a sophisticated commentary on the sociolinguistic imaginaries of Lucian's period. The result is Lucian's approach to integrating and negotiating his authorial persona, as a non-Greek practising Greek sophism, by decoupling linguistic expertise from ethnic identity.

In earlier work Patrick Colm Hogan argued that a few story genres—heroic, romantic, sacrificial, and others—recur prominently across separate literary traditions. These structures recur because they derive from important emotion-motivation systems governing human social interaction, such as group pride and shame. In Colonialism and Literature Hogan extends this work to argue that these genres play a prominent role in the fashioning of postcolonization literature—literature encompassing both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Crucially, colonizers and colonized people commonly understand and explain their situation in terms of these narrative structures. In other words, the stories we tell to some degree simply reflect the facts. But we also tend to interpret our condition in terms of genre, with the genre guiding us about what to record and how to evaluate it. Hogan explores these consequential processes in theoretical and literary analysis, presenting extended, culturally and historically specified interpretations of works by Pádraic Pearse (Ireland), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Kenya), Yasujiro Ozu (Japan), J. M. Coetzee (South Africa), Margaret Atwood (Canada), Rabindranath Tagore (India), Abderrahmane Sissako (Mali), and Dinabandhu Mitra (India).

This is the first book-length study dedicated to Aristophanes'Wasps (422 BCE), which is arguably one of his most hilarious and inventive comedies. At the heart of Wasps is a comic conflict between an Athenian father named Philocleon and his son Bdelycleon; at stake are issues of political discourse, the judicial system, social class and mental illness. Alongside Aristophanes'striking scenes involving a chorus of citizen wasps, a dog trial, and a concluding dance-off between tragedy and comedy, the reader is shown the theatrical genius of the playwright which is able to find the humor in the political, social and generational problems of his time.Ideal for students with no experience in Greek comedy or for researchers wanting an updated analysis of the play, this book explores Wasps in terms of Aristophanes'particular brand of Old Comedy, its historical context, innovative stagecraft and its reception up until the present day. While early modern playwrights such as Ben Jonson and Jean Racine tended to co-opt memorable scenes from Wasps such as the dog trial, more recent productions have interpreted the play as a political comedy about the fragility of democratic institutions. This is the ideal companion for anyone studying Wasps and its effect on later theater.

Focusing on the Greek world during the high Roman Empire between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE, this edited volume examines the representation of space in literary, rhetorical, and mythographic texts of the period. Authors under discussion include major figures such as Dio of Prusa, Aelius Aristides, Arrian, Lucian, and Philostratus. Texts by Apollodorus, Alciphron, Aelian, Artemidorus, and Pausanias also receive attention, along with the Alexander Romance and Egyptian apocalyptic narratives. Attending to the relationship between mobility and cultural rootedness, each chapter examines how Greek writers of the imperial era constructed and represented the multi-temporal landscapes of their contemporary world.This edited volume contributes to a growing interest in the topographical imagination of the ancient Mediterranean. The Roman Empire was a world of vast trade networks, cosmopolitan culture, and high elite mobility, making geography an essential component of the language of power and culture. Volume contributors present a composite picture of how imperial-era Greek writers constructed and curated topographies of the Greek world – urban, rural, cultic, and monumental – to tell new stories about Hellenic space and its place within the broader empire.

Genesis Myth in Beowulf and Old English Biblical Poetry explores the adaptation of antediluvian Genesis and related myth in the Old Testament poems Genesis A and Genesis B, as well as in Beowulf, a secular heroic narrative.The book explores how the Genesis poems resort to the Christian exegetical tradition and draw on secular social norms to deliver their biblically derived and related narratives in a manner relevant to their Christian Anglo-Saxon audiences. In this book it is suggested that these elements work in unison, and that the two Genesis poems function coherently in the context of the Junius 11 manuscript. Moreover, the book explores recourse to Genesis-derived myth in Beowulf, and points to important similarities between this text and the Genesis poems. It is therefore shown that while Beowulf differs from the Genesis poems in several respects, it belongs in a corpus where religious verse enjoys prominence.

Lear's Other Shadow: A Cultural History of Queen Lear offers a deep cultural analysis of the figure of Queen Lear, who shadows and eventually sometimes overshadows her royal husband across the nearly one-thousand-year life of this archetypal tale. What appears to be a deliberate strategy of suppression, even erasure in Shakespeare's King Lear later inspired dozens of stage, page, and cinematic remakes and adaptations in which this figure is revived or remembered, often pointedly so. From Jacob Gordin's Yiddish-language Miriele Efros (1898), through edgy stage remakes such as Gordon Bottomley's King Lear's Wife (1915) and the Women's Theatre Group's Lear's Daughters (1987), to novelized retellings from Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) to Preti Taneja's We That Are Young (2018) and J. R. Thorp's Learwife (2021), and even the television series Empire (2015–2020) and Succession (2018–2023), Queen Lear regularly emerges from her shadowy origins to challenge how we understand the ancient King Leir/King Lear story. These and many other examples reveal fascinating patterns of adaptation and reinterpretation that Lear's Other Shadow identifies and analyzes for the first time, showing how and why Queen Lear is at the center of this ancient story, whether she is heard from or not.

In the Gothic, nothing stays buried for long. Since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century, the Gothic imagination has been concerned with the pasts of the societies from which it emerged. This collection, featuring contributions from archivists, historians and literary critics, examines how horror fiction and the wider Gothic mode have engaged with the constructed conception of'history'.From Victorian nightmares of Jurassic jungles to ghost stories on the contemporary stage, the contributors adopt varied and innovative approaches to consider how the Gothic has created, complicated and sometimes subverted historical narratives. In doing so, these works blur the distinctions between the'historical record'and creative endeavour, undermine linear and sequential understandings of the progress of time and dissolve temporal boundaries. The collection explores a variety of Gothic forms including drama, poetry, prose, illustration, film and folklore, and it draws on classic texts such as Wuthering Heights and Dracula, as well as less familiar works, including Reynolds'The Mysteries of London and Baldini's Mal'aria.Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History will be invaluable to students and scholars interested in the confluences of literary and historical endeavour, the creation and depiction of historical constructs in popular culture, and Gothic horror in its myriad forms.

Why are human societies hierarchical? How did centralized political authority originate? Anthropologists tell us that foraging societies are egalitarian compared to their agrarian and industrial successors. So what prompted our foraging ancestors to submit to the authority of big men, chiefs, and kings? And how did the big man once installed in the center maintain his authority in the face of the resentment mobilized against him? Shakespeare's Exiles addresses these fundamental ethical, political, and anthropological questions by looking at two of Shakespeare's most eccentric big men. Why does Timon, the once-legendary host of Athens, refuse to return to his beloved city? And why does Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, promise to break his staff and throw his books into the deep blue sea? In this highly original and provocative book, Richard van Oort shows that Shakespeare is not just a dramatist but a philosopher, political scientist, and anthropologist too.

This volume traces the growth of Tennessee Williams from being a fragile child to becoming one of America's greatest playwrights, also highlighting the playwright's deep indebtedness to the Southern literary conventions. The book analyses Williams's wonderful play with the sense of time and shows how in The Glass Menagerie as in all memory plays, the protagonist ruminates over the past, re-evaluates himself in that context and has a deeper understanding of the present, eventually using memory to recover from past trauma. One of the chapters analyses the use of the new form in Menagerie that Williams and his contemporaries had begun experimenting with, what Williams referred to as ‘plastic theatre'. Twentieth century American poetic drama, turned out to be contemporary, seeking the universal emotional and psychic truths and simultaneously portraying American life and culture with authenticity. The book also involves an in-depth study of the characters in Menagerie. Tom Wingfield has been critiqued in relationship to the absent father, the formidable mother and the soulmate sister; and the author has focused on, amongst many things, the gender issue. She has provided an analysis and critique of the reproduction of sex and gender and has brought the reader's attention to Tom Wingfield's and the playwright's own struggle to strike a balance between the masculine and the feminine.

What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapseWhat does it mean to live at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? When faced with unfurling catastrophes, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the future. Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She looks to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of a terminal present. While living “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, queer culture reminds us that “to last” is itself also one way to go on. Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—ending and persisting—are constitutively intertwined, Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on futurelessness: the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo/heterosexuality, and the 1980s, in which the spread of the AIDS epidemic threatened the total loss of gay lives and of specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its intimacy with death and loss, offers a rich archive for imagining new ways of thinking through environmental collapse. Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the terminal paradigms that environmentalism fears, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.

With this three-volume companion, students can access the literary and historical significance of the Aeneid in English through an accessible yet authoritative introduction and line-by-line commentary. Written by a teacher who has taught the Aeneid in both English and Latin for more than twenty years, this guide unpicks Virgil's literary techniques, structures and historical resonances. Volume 1 gives you a broad introduction to the historical and philosophical background of the epic; to Virgil's life and works; to the central human and divine characters met in the poem; to how the epic reflects Roman society and its values; to Virgil's literary allusions and stylistic techniques; and to the reception and translation of the epic in later periods. This book also features maps and a family tree so you can trace the travels and lineage of the characters and grasp the geography of the Aeneid's Italy. Plus, the general index to the companion is a valuable reference tool. It can be used with any edition of the Aeneid in Latin or English, as entries are pegged to line numbers. Volumes 2 and 3 present a line-by-line commentary on the poem, with tables and box features illustrating key narrative arcs and structural patterns.

On the Very Edge: Bidentities in Michelle Cliff's Fiction uses the life and work of bisexual, biracial, and bicultural author Michelle Cliff (1946–2016) to develop an entirely new approach to intersectional cultural, race, and gender/sexuality studies that prioritizes “bi-ness” as a methodological tool. The book focuses not “simply” on bisexuality, biracialism, or biculturalism as isolated identity concepts; rather, it explores the very nature of these intersectional identity categories as configured by Cliff. The text, therefore, represents a reclamation of bi identity in Cliff's work as a much broader cultural, and not just sexual or racial, category, arguing that Cliff's spaces and/or stages of “bi-ness” are in themselves significant in understanding contemporary global identity politics, as well as in navigating complex and often damaging identity constructs.Michelle Cliff, partnered with poet Adrienne Rich and “passing” as white, had an often-invisible sexuality and cultural identity. Yet her acclaimed work—Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, Bodies of Water, If I Could Write This in Fire, Free Enterprise, and others—demonstrates the intersections between bisexuality, biracialism, and biculturalism in often profound ways. Drawing on original research, interviews, diaries, editorials, and other correspondences, On the Very Edge will have far-reaching implications in the understanding of complex Caribbean identity politics and intersectional race, gender, and sexuality studies at large.

Contributions by Sara Austin, Rob Bittner, J. Bradley Blankenship, Gabriel Duckels, Caitlin Howlett, Isabel Millán, Jennifer Miller, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Tim Morris, Dana Rudolph, j wallace skelton, Jason Vanfosson, River Vooris, and B. J. WoodsteinPicture books are books aimed at children where the illustrations are as important, or more important, than the text. Picture books, the effects of their simple text and importance in the literary canon, have been studied by scholars for decades, but little attention has been given to LGBTQ+ picture books. Reading LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books is a collection of essays that identifies and interprets children's picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ content.Contributors to the volume include established and emerging scholars with expertise in the fields of children's literature, young adult literature, cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and education. Each essay introduces readers to several children's books that denote unmistakable LGBTQ+ content. Essays bring various interpretive frameworks and intellectual commitments to their unique readings of LGBTQ+ children's picture books. The essays in Reading LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books produce innovative new scholarship about a range of topics including representations of LGBTQ+ marriage and parenting and LGBTQ+ history and culture. The topics explored, and theoretical frameworks applied, significantly expand available and accessible up-to-date scholarship on the growing field of LGBTQ+ children's picture books.

Intersecting Worlds: Colonial Liminality in US Southern and Icelandic Literatures recalibrates readings of US southern and American writers by exploring comparable depictions of race, colonialism, Whiteness, gender, and sexuality in Icelandic literature. This book explores the liminality, ambiguity, and general unease that result when postcolonial theories are applied to both Iceland and the US South. It investigates the parallels and also the limitations to such comparisons with the labels and binaries created to represent colonial dynamics flattening the complex positionings of Iceland and the US South. Iceland, an independent nation since 1944, has a complex colonial history. As a former dependency of Denmark that endured a US military presence from 1941 to 2006, Iceland's global positioning invites comparisons to formerly colonized spaces. At the same time, Iceland's history and geopolitical location differ from other colonized nations, which were subject to brutal violence and dehumanizing practices. This comparative project investigates Iceland's colonial liminality and draws connections to the colonial ambiguity of the US South, depicted as colonized by the federal government during Reconstruction and the site of the colonization of the Black population through slavery and its later iterations.Exploring the work of US southern writers, like William Faulkner, Gayl Jones, Jean Toomer, and Carson McCullers, alongside twentieth-century Icelandic novelists, including Halldór Laxness, Svava Jakobsdóttir, Guðbergur Bergsson, and Fríða Áslaug Sigurðardóttir, on both thematic and aesthetic levels reveals much about each region's history and the complexity of colonial dynamics. Intersecting Worlds centers layers of Whiteness in both national and transnational contexts, challenges ideas of Nordic and US southern exceptionalism, and exposes the complex impacts of colonialism in the Global North and the Global South, as depicted in twentieth-century literature.

Students of twentieth-century literature are familiar with narratives that associate devastating wars with conceptual, societal, and aesthetic upheavals. What these accounts overlook, however, is a body of psychologically attuned modern writing that was less interested in this shattering of faith and form than in those counterfactual modes of resistance deployed by individuals and nations in response to mass violence and profound change. Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War is an innovative study of the attention paid to such reparative, stabilising impulses in post-war writings from across the last century. Focusing on works by Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as case studies, it argues that to fully understand the relationship between modern warfare and literary art, we must learn to engage with texts whose modernity lies in their acknowledgement of the draw felt towards, and contested ethics of, consolatory counterfactuals.

Walking and its relationship to our mental and cultural lives has been a topic of huge academic and popular interest in the last few years. Here, Alan Vardy explores the role of walking in one of its most obvious locations within English literature: Romanticism. Through chapters focusing on both canonical and non-canonical writings – including rich ephemera – by Joseph Cottle, Coleridge, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, de Quincey and John Clare, Time and Terrain in British Romantic Writing draws out a specific focus on affect studies and the relationship between walking and trauma, examining the relationship between emotional states and movement through space and time. It also takes up the work of lesser-known Romantic writers such as Elizabeth Smith and Thomas Wilkinson in order to mount a broad and deep exploration of the quotidian, fleeting events that nonetheless constitute our subjective selves.

The Shakespearean stage offered London playgoers a glimpse of the illiterate and rural plant cultures rapidly disappearing from their increasingly urban and sophisticated lives. The same cultures also circulated in popular texts offstage: bawdy tree ballads, botanical tales, almanacs and accounts of kitchen physic. Here Bonnie Lander Johnson argues that, while Shakespeare's plants offered audiences a nostalgic vision of childhood, domestic education and rural pastimes, this was in fact done with an ironic gesture that claimed for illiterate culture an intellectual relevance ignored by the learned and largely Protestant realm of print. Addressing a long-standing imbalance in early modern scholarship, she reveals how Shakespeare's plays – and the popular, low botanical beliefs they represent – engaged with questions usually deemed high, literate and elite: theological and liturgical controversies, the politics of state, England's role in Elizabethan naval conflict and the increasingly learned realm of medical authority.

An exploration of sleep at the intersection of literature, science, and pharmacology in the early twentieth century.At the turn of the twentieth century, sleep began to be seen not merely as a passive state but as an active, dynamic process crucial to our understanding of consciousness and identity. In Sleep Works, cultural historian and literary scholar Sebastian P. Klinger explores the intriguing connections between scientific inquiry and literary expression during an era when sleep was both a scientific mystery and a cultural fascination. Scientists, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies were at the forefront of this newfound fascination with sleep: some researchers distinguished sleep from related states such as fatigue and hypnosis, while others investigated sleep disorders and developed treatments for insomnia. Meanwhile, literary giants like Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust grappled with their own sleep disturbances and channeled these experiences into their writing. Through the lens of their discoveries, Klinger reveals the broader implications of sleep for concepts of selfhood and agency. Tracing the emergence of interdisciplinary sleep science and the cultural production of sleep through literature, Sleep Works weaves together literary analysis, historical context, and research in the archives of the pharmaceutical industry to provide a comprehensive and compelling account of how sleep has been understood, represented, and experienced in the modern era.

Illuminates how the power of light shaped early twentieth-century art, culture, and poetry.In Brilliant Modernism, Nicoletta Asciuto takes readers on a journey through the electrified streets of the early twentieth century and explores the influence of this illumination on modernist poetry. This ambitious and geographically wide-ranging account of how poets responded to the changing cityscape is distinctive in its historicist approach and the enormous scope of the materials it examines, from Mina Loy's lamps for the modern home to lunar photography.As the glow of gas lamps gave way to the piercing beams of the new era, poets navigated a world where light dictated social standing, gender roles, and the very rhythm of life. Brilliant Modernism is a story of contrasts—the starkness of electric light against the softness of the moon, the traditional against the modern, and the male-dominated world against the rising tide of female empowerment. Asciuto reworks our understanding of the modernist moment, reimagining the influence of figures such as T. S. Eliot, Lola Ridge, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Rosa Rosà.Set against the backdrop of a world on the brink of massive changes, this book shines a light on forgotten women poets and artists whose contributions to the modernist movement have long been overshadowed by their male counterparts. Through a narrative that is as much about the aesthetics of light as it is about the poets themselves, Asciuto illuminates the vibrant and often volatile intersection of technology and culture.

The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression uncovers a forgotten side of modernism: the literature of unemployment and poverty in the 1930s, particularly fiction and poetry about people starving on the street or struggling on welfare, people who often don't know where they'll find their next meal or whether they'll find someplace to sleep. They spend the night on park benches or in filthy flophouses, or they trade sex for food and shelter, or they starve. Time itself changes. For the starving poor standing for hours and hours in a breadline, the speed of modern culture slows down. Parker expands on previous studies of the 1930s by recovering the fiction and poetry of dozens of forgotten writers and reading them together with political cartoons and with underknown writing by such acclaimed or understudied writers as Langston Hughes, Tom Kromer, Dorothy West, and Martha Gellhorn. From an age so immersed in despair and suffering that many writers came to doubt the very idea of literary aesthetics, this book rescues a vast archive of literary analogues to the famous documentary photographs that burned the Depression into American visual memory. It shapes a collective portrait and interpretation of a nearly lost literary history that represents a nation, its crisis, and its literature of crisis from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

Animal, Vegetal, Marginal explores the oft-forgotten yet provocative German genre of die Groteske, or the literary grotesque. This short prose form challenges the norms of being human and being accepted as such by society in exaggerated and satirical ways. Between the Kaiser's and Hitler's Reichs, the genre's irreverent comedy and criticism sold out cabarets, drew droves of radio listeners, and created bestsellers.Yet, because its authors were ruthlessly censored and persecuted, die Groteske is virtually unknown today and neglected by scholarship.Joela Jacobs examines the development and influence of the genre on some of its leading exponents, including Oskar Panizza, Hanns Heinz Ewers, Salomo Friedlaender, and Franz Kafka.Animal, Vegetal, Marginal is the first full-length study of the genre and shows how its portrayals of marginalized and nonhuman perspectives mounted resistance against the rise of the biopolitical structures underpinning nationalism, racism, and antisemitism.

What have depictions of the working class in popular culture added to our understanding of the professional lives of Americans? Scenes from the American Working Class: This Hard Land offers twelve unique and profound answers from some of the most impactful and timeless novels (O! Pioneers, Ann Vickers, and Native Son), films (Blue Collar, Wall Street, and Other People's Money), television shows (The Wire and Mad Men), songs (the work of Bruce Springsteen), and poems (Natasha Tretheway's “Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956”). Key themes include the turn from agrarianism to industrialism and post-industrialism; the challenges particular to women, new immigrants, and workers of color; and the relationship between the demands of the workplace and the responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. Also explored is the extent to which having a productive and fulfilling working life is essential to living a life of meaning and purpose. Although there is a significant gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the “American dream,” these portrayals all give a glimpse into the resiliency and optimism of workers and why the country continues to be a land of hope.

How does the sudden onset of disability impact the sense of self in a person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of what is culturally understood to be an'able'body? How does this experience make visible the structures enabling society's shared notions of heteronormative masculinity?In the United States, the Second World War functioned as a key moment in the emergence of modern understandings of disability, demonstrating that an increased concern with disability in the postwar period would ultimately lead to greater incoherence in the definitions and cultural meanings of disability in America. The Illegible Man examines depictions of disability in American film and literature in twentieth-century postwar contexts, beginning with the first World War and continuing through America's war in Vietnam. Will Kanyusik searches for the origin of discourse surrounding disability and masculinity after the Second World War, examining both literature and film—both fiction and documentary—their depictions of disability and masculinity, and how many of these texts were created by the relationship between the culture industry and the Office of War Information in the 1940s.Supported by original archival research, The Illegible Man presents a new understanding of disability, masculinity, and war in American culture.