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In April 1918, the Leipzig publishing house Insel released its Flämisches Novellenbuch, curated by the literary translator and art critic, Friedrich Markus Huebner. This anthology of contemporary Flemish literature, which promised its readers a literary tour of 'real-life' Flanders, was part of a much larger number of translations sponsored by the German occupier during the First World War in Belgium. This article explores the image of Flanders that was propagated by Huebner in service of the German cultural propaganda, with a focus on its anti-Belgian undertones. Huebner's selection of short stories seems to represent Flanders as a poor, unfulfilled and rural nation, systematically oppressed by the Belgian state. In this regard, the anthology seamlessly aligns itself with the rhetorical strategy deployed by the German occupation administration – a narrative that casted the Belgian state as the true oppressor, while positioning the Germans as loyal allies and benevolent protectors of the Flemings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorises the 'speculative anthology' as a formal experiment in futurity that challenges how anthologies have been used to publish, and promote, science fiction from the Global South in the international literary marketplace. It focuses on the 'Futures Past' series of anthologies published by Comma Press – Iraq+100 (2016), Palestine+100 (2019), Kurdistan+100 (2021), and Egypt+100 (2024) – in which indigenous writers are asked to imagine regional futures one century after a major historical event that has defined the pasts and presents of these existing, or aspiring, nation states. Building on recent scholarship in postcolonial print culture which has proposed new strategies for reading evolving genres of the anthology, I first consider the speculative anthology as a heterogeneous literary form which has the capacity to facilitate creative collaboration and collective forms of critique. At the same time, I show how such anthologies reveal a homogenising impulse, often rooted in national imaginaries, and can encourage an anthropological approach to literary writing, especially by minoritised authors. Reading across the paratextual infrastructures of the 'Futures Past' series, I then compare how individual anthologies are shaped by various speculative editorial and publishing practices. I conclude that this experiment in futurity undertakes meaningful, yet imperfect, speculative work as it imagines how writing about the future by authors from the Global South might be anthologised otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preexisting partial genetic codes can fuse to evolve towards the complete Standard Genetic Code (SGC). Such code fusion provides a path of 'least selection', readily generating precursor codes that resemble the SGC. Consequently, such least selections produce the SGC via minimal, thus rapid, change. Optimal code evolution therefore requires delayed wobble. Early wobble encoding slows code evolution, very specifically diminishing the most likely SGC precursors: near-complete, accurate codes which are the products of code fusions. In contrast: given delayed wobble, the SGC can emerge from a truncation selection/evolutionary radiation based on proficient fused coding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on my teaching experience of nearly 20 years in the Department of Chinese Literature in mainland China, this paper discusses the functions of literary criticism, and how they differ between university education and secondary education. This paper has two main purposes: (1) by examining how Chinese literary criticism evolved since the 1980s, this article shows the important role it played in shaping the ways people think. (2) Through the observation of the new generation of young readers, this paper points out the inflexibility of the existing academic criticism. From my teaching experience, I have observed that the flourishing Chinese network literature represents, since the beginning of the new century, a whole new literary field and traditional literary criticism is facing new challenges. However, with the top-down reform of literature education, literary criticism is more related to the exam system than to the literary creation itself. This means that literary criticism still assumes a very important educational function, but is no longer adapted to the new commercial literary production. This new trend has forced academic criticism to make corresponding adjustments. This paper sees the possibility of establishing a new critical unified field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops an analysis of Future (2019), the first anthology to bring together texts by Black Italian women and non-binary writers of African and Caribbean descent, and reads it in continuity with the pioneering anthology Pecore nere (Black Sheep) (2005), the first collection of short stories to thematize racial difference in postcolonial Italy. It initially articulates a reflection on the anthology as an autonomous genre that has had both a conservative and an innovative function in Italian literature and culture, and then examines how Future openly deploys an intersectional approach to denounce structural racism and sexism and to displace the white and whitening colonial male gaze. The article, furthermore, highlights how Future participates in a transnational creative and critical conversation with other Black feminists, Black Mediterranean and Black European authors, thus contributing to the de-centralization of US narratives about race while further enriching the debate about processes of racialization in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adaptive reuse (AR) of buildings in Iran, is a subject that has had disparate cultural backgrounds, compared to the countries that originated the approach. AR has gradually paved its road during the last five decades from an autocratic ad-hoc policy to a quasi-inclusive socio-political approach. Tehran, as the bicentennial capital of Iran, has always embraced pioneering examples of AR breakthroughs. This article provides a concise policymaking context-based narrative anthology of contemporary AR experience in Tehran through the reading out of the contemporary fluctuations of policies, and the comparative analogy of selected cases. The anthological view focuses on the evolution of the socio-cultural conditions, putting forward the role of policymaking procedures on the AR paradigm. The comparative analogy, then, will frame the typological, cultural, and strategic aspects of the projects to demonstrate the context and objectives of the policy. The fusion of these two processes shows that contrary to the altering situation of heritage policies, the AR has had a growing trend towards a pre-creativity phase, and implicit emancipation from autocracy. It seems that despite the continuity of the 'top-down' policymaking, the AR paradigm could take a more creative and autonomous role in the coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the creativity and learning that can take place when students are given the opportunity to go beyond the GCSE set poems and create their own poetry anthologies. I argue that in the process of creating a poetry anthology, students are encouraged to engage on a deeper and more personal level with poetry. I suggest that when students are given the time, space, and autonomy to create their own anthologies, they not only develop the critical and creative writing skills required for their examinations, but are also more readily able to explore and express their lived experiences. I consider how such a project invites students to develop their writing and shape their identities through drawing on experiences, views and attitudes often overlooked in an increasingly exam-pressurised classroom. I closely examine two students' anthologies, arguing for the need to affirm and advance students' writing through a co-operative creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I seek to trace two main agendas of contemporary Russophone poetry about Crimea: namely, to react to the re-annexation of 2014 by Russia, and, in so doing, to inscribe this event into the preceding poetic tradition of writing on Crimea in terms of continuity or juxtaposition. Analysis of the anthology Our Crimea (2014) reveals intense polyphony, from the problematization of the notion of historical belonging to attempts to anesthetize the painful present with texts of nostalgia for the Crimean idealized past. Following this, close readings of two poem cycles about Crimea, one authored by Aleksandr Kushner and the other by Boris Khersonsky, show that, despite their opposing political views, both poets express their ideas by means of recycling various tropes of Crimea's representation in Russian Modernist poetry. In sum, Crimea remains not only the focus of geopolitical conflict, but also a highly contested literary site for Russophone poets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a sudden proliferation of short story anthologies published in direct response to the refugee 'crisis' of 2015 and the US travel ban of 2017. This article focuses on two of these collections (The Displaced and Banthology, both published in 2018) in order to theorize the reasons behind this phenomenon. What makes an anthology better equipped than a single authored piece of writing to respond to such contemporary themes as migration and displacement? I argue that the answer might lie in the precise nature of their heterogeneous form, which allows anthologies to be assembled and reassembled by various stakeholders during their production and reception so that they mean differently in different times and places. My analysis of the anthology as assemblage brings Deleuze and Guattari's original concept into dialogue with newer notions of queer curation and postcolonial reading in order to conceive of processes of selecting and fitting elements together as deliberate tactics. I pay particular attention to how such processes highlight the agentic role of the reader, allowing them to make their own assemblages from the multiple interrelations that emerge between the anthology's composite elements, and I show through specific examples from primary texts of how this might be done. Developing this concept of assemblage reading (which is here also transnational by nature) allows me to extend the framework of the refugee anthology to encompass a much wider range of acts of collective creation in my conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solitude and a striving to communicate are major themes in the poetry of Walter de la Mare. While best known for his verse and fiction, de la Mare also produced a series of unconventional anthological works which contain explicit treatments of those themes which are only implicit in his creative work. Drawing on the insights found in these anthologies, this paper argues that, for de la Mare, solitude - along with its opposite state, connectedness - form the endpoints of an axis of concern that is present throughout his body of work. His poetry can be read as an exploration of the infinitely varying degrees of solitude and connection that exist between these two absolute states, manifesting as the possibility of communication held indefinitely in abeyance. Furthermore, in a critical essay on the discourse of love, contained in his 1943 anthological work Love, de la Mare links the themes of solitude, connectedness, and the attendant possibilities of communication, to his deep concern with the problems of language. In doing so, he foreshadows the work of later critics concerning absence and presence in literature, and the possibility of language and meaning in the absence of an addressee, doing so at a time when much of the critical consensus took the communicative efficacy of language for granted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how anthologies on youth can be used as an instrument for exploring Italian society. After a brief overview of anthologies as a literary genre, I distinguish three types of collections: didactic anthologies (mainly used by scholars), descriptive anthologies (used as a manifesto to introduce new literary trends or avant-gardes) and experimental anthologies (collections that use works of literature for social inquiries). The first part of the article focuses on the work of Pier Vittorio Tondelli, particularly the anthology Giovani Blues, the first volume of a bigger project called Under 25. The second part explores the collection of short stories L'età della febbre, edited by Raimo and Gazoia in 2015, as the latest example of experimental anthology in Italian literature. The final part focuses on Paolo Sortino's Il casco verde, a dystopic short story collected in the anthology L'età della febbre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of South African English poetry anthologies from their beginning in the 1820s to the present day, though with a particular emphasis on contemporary work. It begins by tracing the background of the most significant anthologies over the years, before discussing some of the theoretical issues involved in compiling an anthology, especially one focusing on South African poetry in English. It then moves on to discuss the various kinds of anthology which have been produced in recent times, illustrating this variety by means of specific examples. It ends by suggesting the sorts of anthology which have not yet been produced and which are needed today. The principal proposal is for an anthology which will enable teachers, learners and the general public to gain access to the field of contemporary South African English poetry and to better understand and appreciate this writing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the 2008 literary anthologyGrowing up Asian in Australia, edited by the young Australian writer and award-winning memoirist, Alice Pung. Featuring a collection of auto/biographically based prose, poetry, and comics by “Asian-Australian” authors, each short text within the anthology focuses on coming-of-age in modern-day Australia. Informed by auto/biography and Asian-Australian studies, this paper explores the cultural work that Pung's anthology aims to do. Through a reading of the anthology's paratexts as well as the short, individual childhood autobiographies, the discussion considers the strategies Pung employs in order to attract a broad readership, and how the anthology mobilizes life narratives of childhood to intervene in debates about Australian national, local, and personal identities at the start of the twenty-first century. I argue that Pung's text skillfully balances politics and populism, critiquing fundamental issues of national identity and self-representation while simultaneously appealing to a broad readership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We, the Iranian asylum seekers in Port Headland, Villawood and Baxter are writing to tell you that we escaped from the country of Iran for our freedom and our survival. (Letter from Iranian detainees, Another Country) In Australia, the field of contemporary creative representation on asylum is enriched by diverse non-professional and community-based work, including self-narratives by asylum seekers and refugees. This essay situates three Australian asylum anthologies as products of heterogeneous community engagements and dialogues. Another Country: Writers in Detention (2004, expanded 2007) is edited by novelists and human rights advocates Thomas Keneally and Rosie Scott; Alone, Together: Writing from Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Australia (2006) is collected and edited by the Refugee Claimants Support Centre in Brisbane; Dark Dreams: Australian Refugee Stories by Young Writers Aged 11-20 Years (2004), is edited by Sonja Dechian, Heather Millar and Eva Sallis. In each anthology, a range of subject-types-men, women and children from different ethnic, cultural, religious and educational backgrounds-coalesces so that a diversity of voices is presented within the privileged space of the book. Drawing lines of rhizomatic connection between autonomous sections of society, the texts map the grassroots structures of support, advocacy and community within which relations between asylum seekers, refugees and Australians operate. In each, writers engage in acts of speaking across the borders of language, culture, education and power, claiming a subaltern stake in cosmopolitan conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the characteristics of the anthology as a literary “meta-genre”. It looks at a range of English-language anthologies of South Asian writing published after independence, and discusses how they have shaped an idea of the subcontinent and its literature for national and transnational audiences. By examining these diverse anthologies, the essay aims to expand prevailing notions of a South Asian literary canon beyond the dominance of the Indian English novel and the nation as a unifying factor for literary production. In the process, the essay explores the relationship between literary value and socio-political engagement in our reading of South Asian writing, with specific reference to the role of the anthology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reception of Psychiatry in Venezuela since the 19th Century to the late 20th Century merits a historical approach. The following work proposes to research some of the very origins of Venezuelan psychiatry and its possible influence on contemporary mental health practice. Through documental research, the early works of local authors from the 19th Century through 20th Century finals: Carlos Arvelo, Lisandro Alvarado, Francisco Herrera Luque, Jose Luis Vethencourt and Jose Solanes, are subjected to study. This journey illustrates a descriptive panoramic view which allows to better comprenhend the current state of our psychiatry. In a brief introduction the most important events are described, since the arrival of Pinel's ideas, followed by the early research paperworks published and the beginnings of the academic teachings of this specialty in Venezuela and displaying the main contemporary research groups thorough the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I take as my subject both anthologies of African American poetry and what is loosely called ecopoetry. I am interested in the governing gestures editors make when they compile anthologies. I make a case for why it matters for ecocritics to read African American poetics as participating in ecopoetics and to include their voices in ecopoetic anthologies; in turn, I also make a case for how African American poetry anthologies could present poems working in the ecopoetic vein, in order to augment their offerings. Both are complementing gestures that would allow us to move toward effecting changes in our interactions with the nonhuman natural world; and I argue that anthologies can play a more complete role in shaping these interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]