Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women’s Texts at Home and in the Diaspora compares colonial and national constructions of gender identity in Western-educated African and South Asian women’s texts. Jaspal Kaur Singh argues that, while some writers conceptualize women’s equality in terms of educational and professional opportunity, sexual liberation, and individualism…
In Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German, James P. Wilper examines a key moment in the development of the modern gay novel by analyzing four novels by German, British, and American writers. Wilper studies how the texts are influenced by and respond and react to four schools of thought regarding male homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.…
The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to severely conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of t…
From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of bibliomigrancy Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves.Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in…
The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, Reclaiming Romanticism rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways that writers and critics engage with the e…
During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of “the folk.” At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined documentary and satire into a hybrid genre that revealed the folk as an anxious product of corporate capitalism, rather than an antidote to commercial culture. In Real Folks, S…
This book shows that William Shakespeare was a more personal writer than any of his innumerable commentators have realised. It asserts that numerous characters and events were drawn from the author's life, and puts faces to the names of Jaques, Touchstone, Feste, Jessica, the 'Dark Lady' and others. Steven Sohmer explores aspects of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets that have been hitherto overlo…
Reader, where are you?”, wondered, in the mid-1880s, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, one of the Russian writers that paid the most attention to the readership of his time. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s call did not go unanswered.
Most literary analysis of the canon of Indonesian literature overlooks its religious aspect. This book is the first to discuss the construction of gender and Islamic identities in literary writing by four prominent Indonesian Muslim women writers: Titis Basino P I, Ratna Indraswari Ibrahim, Abidah El Kalieqy and Helvy Tiana Rosa. The narratives of the four writers are rich sources for revealing…
‘Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field' is the first book to use digital humanities strategies to integrate the scope and methods of book and publishing history with issues and debates in literary studies. By mining, visualising and modelling data from ‘AustLit' – an online bibliography of Australian literature that leads the world in its comprehensiveness and …