Despite its international influence, Polish theatre remains a mystery to many Westerners. This volume attempts to fill in current gaps in English-language scholarship by offering a historical and critical analysis of two of the most influential works of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’ and Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Dead Class’. By examining each director’s representation of A…
This is the first book-length study of the narratology of film music, and an indispensable resource for anyone researching or studying film music or film narratology. It surveys the so far piecemeal discussion of narratological concepts in film music studies, and tries to (cautiously) systematize them, and to expand and refine them with reference to ideas from general narratology and film narra…
What makes a reading experience »powerful«? This volume brings together literary scholars, linguists, and empirical researchers to elucidate the effects and reader responses to investigate just that. The thirteen contributions theorize this widely-used, but to date insufficiently studied notion, and provide insights into the therefore still mysterious-seeming power of literary fiction. The co…
According to relational sociology, power imbalances are at the root of human conflicts and consequently shape the physical and symbolic struggles between interdependent groups or individuals. This volume highlights the role of power relations in the African American experience by applying key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias to black literature and culture. The authors offer new re…
In 'War Pictures', Puckett looks at how Britain imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during wartime. How did the material and conceptual pressures of total war affect what it meant to see or to make art? How did culture and, in particular, cinema function as propaganda, as criticism, as a form of self-analysis, as a reflection on war and the kinds of violence it tends to unleash? How …
Approaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare’s tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being — from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one’s interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the t…
In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing per…
Poetry lives on in the digital age
Story, in the largest sense of the term, is arguably the single most important aspect of narrative. But with the proliferation of antimimetic writing, traditional narrative theory has been inadequate for conceptualizing and theorizing a vast body of innovative narratives. In A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, Brian Richardson proposes a new model for e…
Poems of Aimeric de Peguilhan is the first critical, annotated translation in English of the collected work of poet Aimeric de Peguilhan. In it, William P. Shepard and Frank M. Chambers provide translations and introductory material to the work of the medieval French troubadour.