Anti-Empire explores how different writers across Lusophone spaces have engaged with imperial and colonial power at its various levels of domination, while imagining alternatives to dominant discourses pertaining to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and class. Guided by a theoretically eclectic approach ranging from Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, a…
The present volume introduces new considerations on the topic of "World Literature", penned by leading representatives of the discipline from the United States, India, Japan, the Middle East, England, France and Germany. The essays revolve around the question of what, specifically in today's rapidly globalizing world, may be the productive implications of the concept of World Literature, which …
Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! (2000) encapsulates two thousand years’ worth of utterances in a symbolic act of remembrance and expression of despair for the current age, in which we find “our minds and ears fouled by degraded public speech—by media hype, insipid sermons, hollow political rhetoric, and the ritual misuse of words.” Through 120 densely allusive stanzas—“As many as …
The book raises semiotic questions of human–animal relations: what is the semiotic character of different species, how humans endow animals with meaning, and how animal sign exchange and communication has coped with environmental change. The book takes a zoosemiotic approach and considers different species as being integrated with the environment via their specific umwelt or subjective percep…
Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies, affect studies, and narratology, Affective Disorders explores the significance of emotion in a range of colonial and postcolonial narratives. Through close readings of Naguib Mahfouz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, among others, Bede Scott argues that literary representations of emotion need not be interpreted solel…
We cannot read literary works without making use of the concept of genre. In Old Norse studies, genre has been central to the categorisation, evaluation and understanding of medieval prose and poetry alike; yet its definition has been elusive and its implications often left unexplored. This volume opens up fundamental questions about Old Norse genre in theory and in practice. It offers an exten…
This book is a first step toward a serious reassessment of the mostly unspoken theoretical and aesthetic premises underlying auteur theory.
In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the v…
Few modern materials have been as central to histories of environmental toxicity, medical ignorance, and legal liability as asbestos. A naturally occurring mineral fibre once hailed for its ability to guard against fire, asbestos is now best known for the horrific illnesses it causes. This book offers a new take on the established history of asbestos from a literary critical perspective, showin…
This is a reissue of the first edition of George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which has since evolved to become the largest and most authoritative work of its kind in English. The project grew in the making: the title page of Volume 1 (1879) refers to 'two volumes', but by the time Volume 4 appeared in 1889 there was also a 300-page appendix and a separate index volume. The dictio…