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The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies provides a comprehensive overview of recent research and a range of innovative ways of thinking literature and geography together. It maps the history of literary geography and identifies key developments and debates in the field.Written by leading and emerging scholars from around the world, the 38 chapters are organised into six themed sections, which consider: differing critical methodologies; keywords and concepts; literary geography in the light of literary history; a variety of places, spaces, and landforms; the significance of literary forms and genres; and the role of literary geographies beyond the academy. Presenting the work of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, each section offers readers new angles from which to view the convergence of literary creativity and geographical thought. Collectively, the contributors also address some of the major issues of our time including the climate emergency, movement and migration, and the politics of place.Literary geography is a dynamic interdisciplinary field dedicated to exploring the complex relationships between geography and literature. This cutting-edge collection will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in both Geography and Literary Studies, and scholars interested in the evolving interface between the two disciplines.

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and less well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary and cultural practices. It offers a broad historical span ranging from ancient thinkers and writers, such as Pythagoras and Ovid, to contemporary novelists, including Ruth L. Ozeki and Jonathan Franzen. The expansive historical scope is complemented by a cross-cultural focus which emphasises that the philosophy behind these diets has developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west. The book demonstrates, also, the way in which carnivorism has functioned as an ideology, one which has underpinned actions harmful to both human and non-human animals.

A History of World Literature is a fully revised and expanded edition of The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (2012). This remarkably broad and informative book offers an introduction to “world literature.”Tracing the term from its earliest roots and situating it within a number of relevant contexts from postcolonialism, decoloniality, ecocriticism, and book circulation, Theo D'haen in ten tightly-argued but richly-detailed chapters examines: the return of the term “world literature” and its changing meaning; Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur and how this relates to current debates; theories and theorists who have had an impact on world literature; and how world literature is taught around the world. By examining how world literature is studied around the globe, this book is the ideal guide to an increasingly popular and important term in literary studies. It is accessible and engaging and will be invaluable to students of world literature, comparative literature, translation, postcolonial and decoloniality studies, and materialist approaches, and to anyone with an interest in these or related topics.

Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a captivating collection of research articles. This volume explores the intricate connections between language, culture, and identity across the globe. An agenda-setting introduction by the editors and essays by Liliana Sikorska and Shin-ichi Morimoto establish the scope and stakes of the book as a whole. Chapters by Eri Ohashi, Ruth Karachi Benson Oji, Liliane Hodieb, Zheng Yang, Zhifang Li, and Wanwarang Softic investigate cultural diversity in film. Chapters by Mai Hussein, Wang Chutong, and Darja Zorc Maver offer insights into the linguistic and literary creativity of diasporic and immigrant communities, and a new global context for German literature is developed in chapters by Ekaterina Riabykh, Muharrem Kaplan, and Tomás Espino Barrera. Appealing to scholars, researchers, and students, this interdisciplinary work sheds light on the complexities of our globalized world. Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a valuable addition to the field, offering fresh perspectives on language, culture, and identity.

This volume explores the state of literary theory today, decades after the repeatedly proclaimed end of theory. It builds on the idea that theory is historically constituted as it is “always becoming something else” as Leslie Fiedler claimed in the 1950s, arguing that the historical constitution of theory relies on theory's procedural nature. In order to assess theory's procedural challenge to the fundamental notions that all the disciplines within an episteme have brought to the fore, it addresses these questions: What are the procedures theory has relied on? Are they a secret to its resistance, or is resistance its primary procedure? And if so, a resistance to what? Secondly, if resistance were theory's principal vehicle, at which point does resistance, conceptualized only procedurally (as resisting something, questioning anything, criticizing whatever), display hallmarks of a disciplinary closure that must call for new resistances, and perhapsfor a fundamentally another kind? The book turns to what theory does in order to avoid a partial answer to what theory is.

This book is the first collection to showcase the flourishing field of environmental humanities in Central Asia. A region larger than Europe, Central Asia possesses an astounding range of environments, from deserts to glaciated peaks.The volume brings into conversation scholarship from history to social anthropology, demonstrating the contribution that interdisciplinary and engaged research offers to many urgent issues in the region: from the history of conservationism to the tactics of environmental movements, from literary engagements with ‘pure nature'to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. The collection focuses on the Central Asian republics of the former USSR, where a complex layering of nomadic and sedentary, Turkic and Persianate, Islamic and Soviet cultures ends up affecting human relations with distinct environments. Featuring state-of-the-art contributions, the book enquires into human-environment relations through a broad-brush typology of interactive modes: to extract, protect, enspirit and fear. Broadening the scope of analysis beyond a consideration of power, the authors bring into focus alternative local cosmologies and the unintended consequences of environmental policy. The volume highlights scholarship from within Central Asia as well as expertise elsewhere, offering readers diverse modes of knowledge-production in the environmental humanities.This book is an important resource for researchers and students of the environmental humanities, sustainability, history, politics, anthropology and geography of Asia, as well as Soviet and Post-Soviet studies.Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World explores the idea of literary history across the long span of the Chinese tradition. Although much scholarship on Chinese literature may be characterized as doing the work of literary history, there has been little theoretical engagement with received literary historical categories and assumptions, with how literary historical judgments are formed, and with what it means to do literary history in the first place. The present collection of essays addresses these questions from perspectives emerging both from within the tradition and from without, examining the anthological histories that shape the concept of a particular genre, the interpretive positions that impel our aesthetic judgments, the conceptual categories that determine how literary history is framed, and the history of literary historiography itself. As such, the essays collectively consider what it means to think through the framework of literary history, what literary history affords or omits, and what needs to be theorized in terms of literary history's constraints and possibilities.

Reading the impossible has never seemed less possible. A few decades ago, critical readings could view the collapse of foundationalism optimistically. With meaning no longer soldered onto being, there was hope for all those beings whose meaning had been forever ordained by Nature or the Divine. Critical reading thus became a way of exploring the devious workings of knowledge and power. But as non-foundational systems of meaning have proven to be so perfectly suited to the transactional logics of the market, reading for the impasses of meaning has come to be seen as quixotic, impractical, and dated. To concur with that view, Elizabeth Weed argues, is to embrace the fantasy told by the neoliberal order. To read the impossible is to disrupt that fantasy, with its return to stable categories of marketable identity, in order to contest the inexorable workings of misogyny and racism. This book seeks to disturb the positivity of identity in the hope of retrieving the impossibility of sexual difference, an impossibility that has its effects in the Real of misogyny.A return to the famous debate between Derrida and Lacan on the impossibility of sexual difference yields two different readings of the impossible. In reconsidering these questions, Weed shows how the practice of reading can powerfully stage the wiles of language and the unconscious. In returning to that earlier moment in the context of current debates on the role of reading and interpretation, Weed offers a fresh perspective on what is at stake for critical reading in the neoliberal university.

Cultural Representation of the Second Wife: Literature, Stage, and Screen, is a multifaceted, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural work that provides insights into the realities of second wives the world over. This book allows the reader a three-dimensional view of the second wife experience. It asks: What does it mean, and what does it feel like, to be a second wife in a polygamous union or in a monogamous partnership? Is there a difference? Together, the writers in this book cleverly create an in-depth study of the subject through the productions referred to in the title, to offer a different approach to the popularly held views of the second wife. The book addresses the intricacies, customs, practices and lifestyles of the various Eastern and Western cultures and demonstrates the abilities of the Humanities to connect and interrelate with other disciplines as well as with the reader's own world.

In this outstanding collection, essayist Christopher Hitchens's works are shared–a must-have for Hitchens completists seeking a further understanding of his brilliant mind. Anthologized here for the first time, A Hitch in Time is a choice selection of Christopher Hitchens's finest reviews, diary entries, and essays–along with a smattering of ferocious letters.A Hitch in Time is a banquet of entertaining stories ranging from his thoughts on Salman Rushdie to being spanked by Margaret Thatcher in The House of Lords, and the night he took his son to the Oscars. Along with an introduction by James Wolcott, A Hitch in Time recaptures the brilliance of Hitchens–barnstorming, cauterizing, and ultimately uncontainable.

A study of supine, prone, and recumbent figures in contemporary literature The prostitute, the protester, the murder victim, the invalid, the layabout, the depressive: all are associated with lying down. Skewing and flattening the perpendicular axis that defines the human in Western philosophy, art, and humanist inquiry, these downward-directed figures'refusals or failures to hew to the moral and postural logics of uprightness enable a reassessment of subjectivity, ecological relation, and representation—that last of which is, after all, a process of standing-in-for. Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form works across an array of well-known and counter-canonical texts, showing that recumbent figures saturate the literary arts of the present and respond to the proliferation of contemporary forms of grounding, in all its meanings. Reading these figures in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies, disability studies, and horizontalist feminisms, Sarah Dowling reveals the potential in thinking with and through a position stretched out across, dependent on, and undetachable from the earth.

The essays in this volume focus on new approaches to how literature reflects and creates ‘world', and thus to the issues of “literature ‘and'world” and “literature ‘as'world”. They discuss questions of the implied worldview of literary texts on the one hand, and the way literature may create ‘world'through self-referentiality and the establishing of intermedial relations with other arts on the other. In the latter cases, works will foreground their own fictionality and/or mediality, and their status as artefacts and as the products of a poietic act of creation. Illustrating the potential of new approaches and developments for describing the nature of the worlds devised in fictional texts, the authors pay tribute to a scholar whose work has been foundational regarding the study of metareferentiality in literature and the arts, contemporary intermediality studies and the study of implied worldviews in literary texts: Werner Wolf.

At the outset of Marx for Cats, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism's feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats have long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration.

Great Trials and the Law in the Historical Imagination: A Law and Humanities Approach introduces readers to the history of law and issues in historical, legal, and artistic interpretation by examining six well-known historical trials through works of art that portray them. Great Trials provides readers with an accessible, non-dogmatic introduction to the interdisciplinary ‘law and humanities'approach to law, legal history, and legal interpretation. By examining how six famous/notorious trials in Western history have been portrayed in six major works of art, the book shows how issues of legal, historical, and artistic interpretation can become intertwined: the different ways we embed law in narrative, how we bring conscious and subconscious conceptions of history to our interpretation of law, and how aesthetic predilections and moral commitments to the law may influence our views of history. The book studies well-known depictions of the trials of Socrates, Cicero, Jesus, Thomas More, the Salem ‘witches', and John Scopes and provides innovative analyses of those works. The epilogue examines how historical methodology and historical imagination are crucial to both our understanding of the law and our aesthetic choices through various readings of Harper Lee's beloved character, Atticus Finch.The first book to employ a ‘law and humanities'approach to delve into the institution of the trial, and what it means in different legal systems at different historical times, this book will appeal to academics, students and others with interests in legal history, law and popular culture and law and the humanities.

Stilkunden beschäftigen sich in der Regel mit dem, was als guter Stil gilt, der schlechte findet allenfalls am Rande Erwähnung. Dabei ist er, statistisch gesehen, viel verbreiteter als der gute und verdiente schon deshalb größere Aufmerksamkeit. Außerdem hat er in seinen mannigfaltigen Erscheinungsformen durchaus eigene, wenn auch meist unbeabsichtigte Reize. Stefan aus dem Siepen nimmt sich ihrer mit der Leidenschaft eines maliziösen Genießers an. Erzählerische Nachlässigkeiten, überfrachtete Sätze, missglückte Anfänge, preziöse Wortwahl, sprachliche Vulgaritäten, schiefe Metaphern, raunende Titel, ungelenke Intimszenen, … – sämtliche vorgestellten stilistischen Patzer stammen aus den Federn großer Schriftsteller. Selbst diese waren gegen gelegentliche Ausrutscher nicht gefeit. Stefan aus dem Siepen legt mit seiner spiegelverkehrten Stilkunde keine Anthologie pedantisch kompilierter literarischer Fehlgriffe vor, vielmehr erweist er dem Geglückten seine Reverenz. Denn die Reflexionen über das sprachliche Pappmaché handeln immer auch von den edleren Materialien der Literatur.

Si può amare il «De rerum natura»? Sì, a pat­to, spiega Giuliani, di rovesciare la creden­za comune secondo la quale Lucrezio mette in versi la dottrina materialistica epicu­rea. Si imporrà allora quel «razionalismo visionario» che, attraverso l'esplorazione dei fenomeni di ogni ordine, «si esalta oltre le mura fiammeggianti del mondo». Ma rovesciare la credenza comune richie­de – direbbe Manganelli – qualcosa di più di un sapere «da professore o da irto pe­dagogo». Esige un lettore avido di «tran­gugiare polpa di chimere» e di accumula­re biblioteche personali, capace di gelose relazioni (con Kierkegaard, per esempio) come di improvvise scoperte e meditate ri­pulse; un critico tanto immune da timorati specialismi e paralizzanti gerarchie da sen­tirsi a proprio agio discorrendo del mon­do «fragile e tenace come una ragnatela» della «Storia di Genji» o della patafisica di Jar­ry, «scienza ingorda di annettersi l'univer­so». E, soprattutto, uno scrittore in grado di afferrare ciò che ha letto e di restituirlo con memorabile incisività: così il Samuel Johnson di Boswell è una specie di «Pick­wick ciceroniano», l'amato Leopardi «un materialista platonico», Cioran «un dandy della maldicenza metafisica», e «Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore» di Calvino «un trucco d'amore per attrarre la letteratura nel vuoto e lasciarla lì sospesa». Senza que­sta fatale qualità, del resto, Giuliani non sarebbe riuscito a trasmetterci la sua pas­sione – e insieme a irriderla: «Non sono forse così, abbuffate trimalcioniche, vuoti farciti di studiate leccornie, le nostre in­ cessanti letture...?».

A preeminent Renaissance scholar illuminates early modern encounters with books, in which literature became a portal to self-awareness and miraculous communion between author and reader.The experience of reading is often presented as personal and transformative—a journey of self-discovery and, perhaps, renewal. In A Marvelous Solitude, Lina Bolzoni examines the early modern roots of this attitude toward the readerly act. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, European men of letters increasingly came to see books as something more than compendia of knowledge: they could also help readers understand the human condition. As Bolzoni shows, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso all presented reading as a private encounter and a dialogue with the author.For many Renaissance intellectuals, reading was instrumental to the construction of the self, which was enriched by contact with other learned men. These readers imagined the book as a mirror image of its author, with whom they held a secret affinity. In their letters to one another, humanists described the book as a body, reflecting the notion that reading literature placed its author in the room with oneself. Reading the work of a deceased author became akin to a necromantic rite, as the writers of bygone times were resurrected and placed in contemporary conversation. The vogue for hanging portraits of authors in libraries and studios ensured that the image of the creator was never far from his words, cementing bonds of friendship across barriers of time.These myths—charming, fragile, and powerful—invested the readerly encounter with miraculous properties that lingered in the hearts of the Romantics. And something of those wonders persists today, in the intimate feeling that reading yet provokes.

En este libro se estudian diversos modos de tráfico entre películas y narrativa literaria, ya sean casos de inspiración «a distancia» o indirecta; de adaptaciones puntuales del libro a la pantalla o en sentido contrario; de convergencias, emulaciones o desencuentros entre la obra de determinados escritores y cineastas, o entre la escritura «guionística» y la literaria. Otros ensayos tratan de esclarecer asuntos más generales, como el descarrilamiento de la literatura bajo el influjo del cine, o exponen y resuelven cuestiones prácticas: cómo «traducir» ciertas obras eminentes a imágenes audiovisuales que las honren debidamente, o cómo no hacerlo, cuando el ejemplo es fallido.

This book examines how Methodism and popular review criticism intersected with and informed each other in the eighteenth century. Methodism emerged at a time when the idea of a ‘public square'was taking shape, a process facilitated by the periodical press. Perhaps more so than any previous religious movement, Methodism, and the publications associated with it, received greater scrutiny largely because of periodical literature and the emergence of popular review criticism. The book considers in particular how works addressing Methodism were discussed and critiqued in the era's two leading literary periodicals – The Monthly Review and The Critical Review. Focusing on the period between 1749 and 1789, the study encompasses the formative years of popular review criticism and some of the more dramatic moments in the textual culture of early Methodism. The author illustrates some of the specific ways these review journals diverged in their critical approaches and sensibilities as well as their politics and religious opinions. The Monthly's and the Critical's responses to the Methodists'own publishing efforts as well as the anti-Methodist critique are shown to be both multifaceted and complex. The book critically reflects on the pretended neutrality, reasonableness, and objectivity of reviewers, who at times found themselves negotiating between the desire to regulate literary tastes and the impulse to undermine the Methodist revival. It will be relevant to scholars of religion, history and literary studies with an interest in Methodism, print culture, and the eighteenth century.

Der Band analysiert das Motiv der Insel in der deutschsprachigen Literatur und Kultur. Ausgehend von mittelalterlichen Texten spannt er über Reisebeschreibungen der Neuzeit und des 18. wie des 19. Jahrhunderts einen Bogen bis in die Gegenwart, wobei sein Schwerpunkt auf dem 20. und 21. Jahrhundert liegt. In allen untersuchten Texten und Filmen spielen Inseln eine wesentliche Rolle als literarischer und kultureller Raum. Dem Inselmotiv zugeordnete Themenkomplexe wie Utopie, Dystopie und Narrative der Reise werden an den unterschiedlichsten Werken und Filmen dargestellt. Dazu gesellen sich literarhistorische und kultursoziologische Studien über die Insel als Metapher, als Flucht oder als Projektionsfläche sozialer Wunschvorstellungen.

Theatre has a remarkable capacity: it touches from a distance. The audience is affected, despite their physical separation from the stage. The spectators are moved, even though the fictional world presented to them will never come into direct touch with their real lives. Shakespeare is clearly one of the master practitioners of theatrical touch. As the study shows, his exceptional dramaturgic talent is intrinsically connected with being one of the great thinkers of touch. His plays fathom the complexity and power of a fascinating notion – touch as a productive proximity that is characterised by unbridgeable distance – which philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Nancy have written about, centuries later. By playing with touch and its metatheatrical implications, Shakespeare raises questions that make his theatrical art point towards modernity: how are communities to form when traditional institutions begin to crumble? What happens to selfhood when time speeds up, when oneness and timeless truth can no longer serve as reliable foundations? What is the role and the capacity of language in a world that has lost its seemingly unshakeable belief and trust in meaning? How are we to conceive of the unthinkable extremes of human existence – birth and death – when the religious orthodoxy slowly ceases to give satisfactory explanations? Shakespeare's theatre not only prompts these questions, but provides us with answers. They are all related to touch, and they are all theatrical at their core: they are argued and performed by the striking experience of theatre's capacities to touch – at a distance.

Pienso que un lector no es alguien que acumula lecturas, sino, más bien, alguien que aprende a leer de distintas maneras, guiado por diferentes preguntas, a lo largo de su vida. No creo que nadie aprenda a leer de una vez y para siempre. Todo gran texto —incluso toda gran película y todo gran disco— nos pone en situación de tener que volver a construir modos de indagación y contacto con el objeto. Quisiera pensar que pude escribir no solo sobre textos y películas que me conmovieron, sino también sobre esas pequeñas modulaciones en mi percepción. Las historias no son más que historias. Se cuenta, se leen, a veces se escriben. El problema es comprender su poder para deformar. Comprender la distancia atroz entre la vida y las palabras. Alcanzar, por un momento, la certeza de la incomunicación que anida en el lenguaje.

Recording the history of the belief in the existence of Satan, this book draws from the Bible, the poetry of Dante and Milton, the legend of Faust, and from modern novels and plays such as the works of Mark Twain and G.B. Shaw, and the spiritual writing of C. S. Lewis. Fintan Lyons O.S.B. chronicles the decline of that belief through the centuries as well as the attempts to treat the problem of evil philosophically, using the insights of thinkers such as Karl Barth. At the heart of this book is the attempt to synthesise or reconcile traditional belief with contemporary concern or even alarm regarding evil in the world. Lyons argues that evidence for the persistence of evil has been striking in modern times in wars and atrocities, while phenomena such as Satanic Cults and possible or real diabolical possession have continued to increase. The Catholic Church reacted to this situation in 1998 with a revision of the 1614 Rite of Exorcism, analysed in this book from both theological and psychological standpoints. By arguing that the transition from belief in Satan to personification of evil in historical regimes and characters brings contemporary culture into sharp focus, this book chronicles the history of humanity's attempt to understand the disturbing and mysterious reality of evil.

The history of the modern riot parallels the development of the modern novel and the modern lyric. Yet there has been no sustained attempt to trace or theorize the various ways writers over time and in different contexts have shaped cultural perceptions of the riot as a distinctive form of political and social expression. Through a focus on questions of voice, massing, and mediation, this collection is the first cross-cultural study of the interrelatedness of a prevalent mode of political and economic protest and the variable styles of writing that riots inspired. This volume will provide historical depth and cultural nuance, as well as examine more recent theoretical attempts to understand the resurgence of rioting in a time of unprecedented global uncertainty. One of the key contentions of this collection is that literature has done more than merely record riotous practices. Rather literature has, in variable ways, used them as raw material to stimulate and accelerate its own formal development and critical responsiveness. For some writers this has manifested in a move away from classical norms of propriety and accord, and toward a more openly contingent, chaotic, and unpredictable scenography and cast of dramatis personae, while others have moved towards narrative realism or, more recently, digital media platforms to manifest the crises that riots unleash. Keenly attuned to these formal variations, the essays in this collection analyse literature's fraught dialogue with the histories of violence that are bound up in the riot as an inherently volatile form of collective action.

From the Foreword These pieces are selections from work done in the Thirties, a decade so changeable that I at first thought of assembling them under the title,'While Everything Flows.'Their primary interest is in speculation on the nature of linguistic, or symbolic, or literary action--and in a search for more precise ways of locating or defining such action. Words are aspects of a much wider communicative context, most of which is not verbal at all. Yet words also have a nature peculiarly their own. And when discussing them as modes of action, we must consider both this nature as words in themselves and the nature they get from the non-verbal scenes that support their acts. I shall be happy if the reader can say of this book that, while always considering words as acts upon a scene, it avoids the excess of environmentalist schools which are usually so eager to trace the relationships between act and scene that they neglect to trace the structure of the act itself.From the Foreword These pieces are selections from work done in the Thirties, a decade so changeable that I at first thought of assembling them under the title,'While Everything Flows.'Their primary interest is in speculation on the nature of linguis