Writing about World Literature, a new guide created to accompany the Norton Anthology, covers the processes and particulars of writing in the world literature survey course. Starting with the essentia
Designed to offer a clear, concise, and accessible way to explore the familiar and unfamiliar territories of world literature, this two-volume version of "The Bedford Anthology of World Literature" of
In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, and African exploration. T
In Victorian Writing about Risk, first published in 2000, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, Alpine mountaineering and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the labouring and middle classes, the English and the Irish, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities which allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places. The texts that this study focuses on reveal the ways in which risk moralizes and naturalizes the economic and political institutions of industrial, imperial culture during a period of unprecedented expansion and change.
This volume brings together an international cast of scholars from a variety of fields to examine the racial and colonial aspects of the First World War, and show how issues of race and empire shaped its literature and culture. The global nature of the First World War is fast becoming the focus of intense enquiry. This book analyses European discourses about colonial participation and recovers the war experience of different racial, ethnic and national groups, including the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, Maori, West Africans and Jamaicans. It also investigates testimonial and literary writings, from war diaries and nursing memoirs to Irish, New Zealand and African American literature, and analyses processes of memory and commemoration in the former colonies and dominions. Drawing upon archival, literary and visual material, the book provides a compelling account of the conflict's reverberations in Europe and its empires and reclaims the multiracial dimensions of war memory.
This volume brings together an international cast of scholars from a variety of fields to examine the racial and colonial aspects of the First World War, and show how issues of race and empire shaped its literature and culture. The global nature of the First World War is fast becoming the focus of intense enquiry. This book analyses European discourses about colonial participation and recovers the war experience of different racial, ethnic and national groups, including the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, Maori, West Africans and Jamaicans. It also investigates testimonial and literary writings, from war diaries and nursing memoirs to Irish, New Zealand and African American literature, and analyses processes of memory and commemoration in the former colonies and dominions. Drawing upon archival, literary and visual material, the book provides a compelling account of the conflict's reverberations in Europe and its empires and reclaims the multiracial dimensions of war memory.
Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in way
Women's Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia presents fresh and engaging translations of works that were composed or edited by female scribes and elite women of the ancient Near East. These texts provide insight into the social status, struggles, and achievements of women during the earliest periods of recorded human history (c.2300–540 BCE). In three introductory chapters and a concluding chapter, Charles Halton and Saana Svärd provide an overview of the civilization of ancient Mesopotamia and examine gender by analyzing these different kinds of texts. The translations cover a range of genres, including hymns, poems, prayers, letters, inscriptions, and oracles. Each text is accompanied by a short introduction that situates the composition within its ancient environment and explores what it reveals about the lives of women within the ancient world. This anthology will serve as an essential reference book for scholars and students of ancient history, gender studies, and world literature.
This book offers an in-depth engagement with the growing body of Anglophone Arab fiction in the context of theoretical debates around memory and identity. Against the critical tendency to dismiss nostalgia as a sentimental trope of immigrant narratives, Qutait sheds light on the creative uses to which it is put in the works of Rabih Alameddine, Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Leila Aboulela, Randa Jarrar, Rawi Hage, and others. Arguing for the necessity of theorising cultural memory beyond Eurocentric frameworks, the book demonstrates how Arab novelists writing in English draw on nostalgia as a touchstone of Arabic literary tradition from pre-Islamic poetry to the present. Qutait situates Anglophone Arab fiction within contentious debates about the place of the past in the Arab world, tracing how writers have deployed nostalgia as an aesthetic strategy to deal with subject matter ranging from the Islamic golden age, the era of anti-colonial struggle, the failures of the postcolonial state
This book is about the most vibrant yet under-studied aspects of Indian writing today. It examines multilingualism, current debates on postcolonial versus world literature, the impact of translation o
In this authoritative and accessible account of French literature, sixteen essays by leading specialists offer provocative insights into French literary culture, its genres, movements, themes, and historic turning points, including the cultural and linguistic challenges of today's multi-ethnic France. The French have, over the centuries, invented and reinvented writing, from the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes to Montaigne's Essays, which gave the world a new literary form and a new standard for writing about personal thought and experience; from the highly polished tragedies of French classicism to the satirical novels of the Enlightenment; from Proust's explorations of social and sexual mores to the 'New Novel' of the late twentieth century; and from Baudelaire's urban poetry to today's poetic experiments with sound and typography. The broad scope of this Companion, which goes beyond individual authors or periods, enables a deeper appreciation for the distinctive literature
Examining images of literacy in African and West Indian novels, Neil ten Kortenaar looks at how postcolonial authors have thought about the act of writing itself. Writing arrived in many parts of Africa as part of colonization in the twentieth century, and with it a whole world of book-learning and paper-pushing; of school and bureaucracy; newspapers, textbooks and letters; candles, hurricane lamps and electricity; pens, paper, typewriters and printed type; and orthography developed for formerly oral languages. Writing only penetrated many layers of West Indian society in the same era. The range of writers is wide, and includes Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and V. S. Naipaul. The chapters rely on close reading of canonical novels, but discuss general themes and trends in African and Caribbean literature. Ten Kortenaar's sensitive and penetrating treatment of these themes makes this an important contribution to the growing field of postcolonial literary studies.
In this authoritative and accessible account of French literature, sixteen essays by leading specialists offer provocative insights into French literary culture, its genres, movements, themes, and historic turning points, including the cultural and linguistic challenges of today's multi-ethnic France. The French have, over the centuries, invented and reinvented writing, from the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes to Montaigne's Essays, which gave the world a new literary form and a new standard for writing about personal thought and experience; from the highly polished tragedies of French classicism to the satirical novels of the Enlightenment; from Proust's explorations of social and sexual mores to the 'New Novel' of the late twentieth century; and from Baudelaire's urban poetry to today's poetic experiments with sound and typography. The broad scope of this Companion, which goes beyond individual authors or periods, enables a deeper appreciation for the distinctive literature
Global Appetites explores how industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements underpin US conceptions of global power in the century since the First World War. Allison Carruth's study centers on what she terms the 'literature of food' - a body of work that comprises literary realism, late modernism and magical realism along with culinary writing, food memoir and advertising. Through analysis of American texts ranging from Willa Cather's novel O Pioneers! (1913) to Novella Carpenter's non-fiction work Farm City (2009), Carruth argues that stories about how the United States cultivates, distributes and consumes food imbue it with the power to transform social and ecological systems around the world. Lively and accessible, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars of American literature and culture as well as those working in the fields of food studies, food policy, agriculture history, social justice and the environmental humanities.
Christopher Mulvey has entered the world of travellers writing about their journeys abroad – Americans in their travels through England, and the English in their forays to the United States – during the eighty years following the end of the 1812–15 War. The writings of travellers from one country about the other dispel the myth that good manners were a universal value, and any variations were to be explained in terms of moral or political corruptions of one or the other nation. The impact of different yet somehow familiar cultures is highlighted in chapters which explore the contemporary issues of the nineteenth-century American woman, slavery, and the English poor. Mulvey also examines the American traveller's view of such English institutions as those of the gentleman, the aristocracy, and the servant and, in comparison, the English opinion of American merchant society, planter society and the American West.
Christopher Mulvey has entered the world of travellers writing about their journeys abroad – Americans in their travels through England, and the English in their forays to the United States – during the eighty years following the end of the 1812–15 War. The writings of travellers from one country about the other dispel the myth that good manners were a universal value, and any variations were to be explained in terms of moral or political corruptions of one or the other nation. The impact of different yet somehow familiar cultures is highlighted in chapters which explore the contemporary issues of the nineteenth-century American woman, slavery, and the English poor. Mulvey also examines the American traveller's view of such English institutions as those of the gentleman, the aristocracy, and the servant and, in comparison, the English opinion of American merchant society, planter society and the American West.
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx
In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, an international group of scholars illustrate the immense riches of environmental writing from the earliest literary periods down to the present. It addresses ancient writings about humanimal/plant relations from India, classical Greece, Chinese and Japanese literature, the Maya Popol Vuh, Islamic texts, medieval European works, eighteenth-century and Romantic ecologies, colonial/postcolonial environmental interrelations, responses to industrialization, and the emerging literatures of the world in the present Anthropocene moment. Essays range from Trinidad to New Zealand, Estonia to Brazil. Discussion of these texts indicates a variety of ways environmental criticism can fruitfully engage literary works and cultures from every continent and every historical period. This is a uniquely varied and rich international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present. It provides a compelling a
Harnessing new enthusiasm for Nan Shepherd’s writing, The Living World asks how literature might help us reimagine humanity’s place on earth in the midst of our ecological crisis. The first book to examine Shepherd’s writing through an ecocritical lens, it reveals forgotten details about the scientific, political and philosophical climate of early twentieth century Scotland, and offers new insights into Shepherd’s distinctive environmental thought. More than this, this book reveals how Shepherd’s ways of relating to complex, interconnected ecologies predate many of the core themes and concerns of the multi-disciplinary environmental humanities, and may inform their future development.Broken down into chapters focusing on themes of place, ecology, environmentalism, Deep Time, vital matter and selfhood, The Living World offers the first integrated study of Shepherd’s writing and legacy, making the work of this philosopher, feminist, amateur ecologist, geologist, and innovative modern
Classical and Medieval Literature CriticismM assembles and contextualizes critical responses to the works of writers of all sorts--poets, playwrights, chroniclers, philosophers, religious figures, and writers from other genres--from every region of the world, from the earliest known examples of written works to the eve of the modern era. Clear, accessible introductory essays followed by carefully selected critical responses allow end-users to engage with a variety of scholarly views and conversations about authors, works and literary topics. Students writing papers or class presentations, instructors preparing their syllabi, or anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the period will find this a highly useful resource. Each of the more than 160 volumes in this long-standing series profiles approximately 3-6 authors or individual works of all genres, by providing a brief introduction and a collection of full-text or excerpted criticism reproduced from books, magazines, literary reviews,
