Pageantry and Power is the first full and in-depth cultural history of the Lord Mayor’s Show in the early modern period. It provides new insight into the culture and history of the London of Shakespeare’s time and beyond.Central to the cultural life of London, the Lord Mayor’s Shows were high-profile and lavish entertainments produced by some of the most talented writers of…
This volume offers a survey of the reception of Classical Antiquity in the literature for youngsters by applying regional perspectives from East-Central and Western Europe, Africa, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, and the United States. The title Our Mythical Childhood hints at the elusive and paradoxical potential of the ancient tradition that is both a fixed base shared by many people worl…
The Other Women's Lib provides the first systematic analysis of Japanese literary feminist discourse of the 1960s - a full decade before the "women's lib" movement emerged in Japan. It highlights the work of three well-known female writers of avant-garde fiction from this generation: Kono Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko. Focusing on four tropes persistently employed by these write…
"At long last, a discussion of plagiarism that doesn't stop at 'Don't do it or else,' but does full justice to the intellectual interest of the topic!" ---Gerald Graff, author of Clueless in Academe and 2008 President, Modern Language Association This collection is a timely intervention in national debates about what constitutes original or plagiarized writing in the digital age. Somewhat ironi…
Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of s…
Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa.
In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaph…
Finalist for the 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in the Essay category From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation, a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is…
The inclusion of works in a canonical list creates a large body of exclusions. But among these neglected works there are not a few that nevertheless are worth reading. Literary worth is not necessarily aesthetic impeccability. A literary work recommends itself by a high degree of artistic achievement with elbowroom for historical importance. The present study focuses on Leo Rosten’s immigrati…
The mid thirteenth-century Dutch beast epic Van den vos Reynaerde is a fascinating reworking of the most popular branch of the Old French Roman de Renart and one of the finest examples of this popular genre, consisting of a lengthy cycle of animal tales which provided a satirical commentary on human society. Featuring the archetypal sly fox, the epic is also one of earliest examples of a longer…