Of Mice and Men: Animals in Human Culture edited by Nandita Batra and Vartan P. Messier
‘Of Mice and Men: Animals in Human Culture’ is a book-length collection of essays that examines human views of non-human animals. The essays are written by scholars from Australia, East Asia, Europe and the Americas, who represent a wide range of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Addressing topics such as animal rights, ecology, anthropocentrism, feminism, animal domestication, dietary restrictions, and cultural imperialism, the book considers local and global issues as well as ancient and contemporary discourses, and it will appeal to readers with both general and specialized interests in the role played by animals in human cultures.
This Watery World: Humans and the Sea edited by Vartan P. Messier and Nandita Batra
Humans have a multiplicity of bonds with the sea: “real” as well as representational. Acknowledging the validity of both aspects, This Watery World attempts to provide an archeology of human-marine interaction. It draws together papers from those who have both material and metaphoric relations with the sea: activists, divers, marine biologists, environmentalists, artists, photographers, and humanistic scholars. Drawing on the New Maritime Humanities, it examines a range of topics – from the use of marine metaphors in literature and film, to the untold histories of the so-called history-less sea, to strategies for saving our damaged beaches and reefs in the Caribbean.
The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction edited by Nandita Batra and Mario Wenning
Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.
This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.
The Far Away Home by Marci Denesiuk
Denesiuk’s dark and beautiful characters find themselves in astonishing places, united by their simple and desperate quest—the quest for home
French edition: Le chez-nous perdue translated by Marie Frankland
Mi María: Surviving the Storm: Voices from Puerto Rico edited by Ricia Anne Chansky and Marci Denesiuk
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane María pummeled Puerto Rico for over thirty hours. As brutal as the storm was, the real catastrophe was yet to come. Lack of government support left many in the archipelago without electricity, clean drinking water, food, and medical care for months. Years later, Puerto Rico is still recovering.
Mi María: Surviving the Storm brings together seventeen stories of perseverance and community that ask what it means to be a US citizen in a colonial context, how communities come together in the wake of disaster, and how precarity is exacerbated for those on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Hear from: Zaira, who survived the hurricane by floating on a patched air mattress for sixteen hours; Neysha, who gave birth prematurely in a clinic without electricity, running water, or a working phone; Carlos, a coffee farmer whose harvest and home were destroyed for the second time in his life; and many others.
Maxy Survives the Hurricane / Maxy sobrevive el huracán by Ricia Anne Chansky and Yarelis Marcial and illustrations by Olga Barinova
Maxy the dog and his family survive Hurricane Maria, but Maxy—like many children who go through natural disasters—becomes terrified of storms. With help from his loved ones, he learns to overcome his fear and appreciate the benefits of rain.
The Routledge Auto Biography Studies Reader edited by Ricia A. Chansky and Emily Hipchen
The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader collects together key theoretical essays in the field, creating a solid base for any critical study of autobiography, biography, or life writing.
Beginning with a foreword by Sidonie Smith and a general introduction to the collection, the book is then divided into three sections―Foundations, Transformations, and Futures―each with its own introduction. Significant themes weave throughout the sections, including canonicity; genre, modality, and interdisciplinarity; reclamation of texts; disability and the contested body; trauma; agency, silence, and voicing; celebrity culture; digital lives; subjects in the margins; postcolonialism; posthumanism; and, ecocriticism. Attention has also been given to a variety of methodological approaches, such as archival research, genealogical study, DNA testing, autoethnography, testimonio, and oral history, among others.
A lo lejos, el cielo by Hugo Ríos Cordero
Situados en el silencio de lo cotidiano, los sujetos de los cuentos de A lo lejos, el cielo, reproducen versiones de sus propias historias; entran al espacio de su memoria (y la de otros) como si se tratara de la ficción misma. Estos cuentos sin fronteras funden recuerdos, sueños, testimonios y juegos sardónicos que cancelan la realidad y pormenorizan la “mise en abyme” y el simulacro en el que viven sus protagonistas.
Al otro lado de tus párpados by Hugo Ríos Cordero
Este libro podría aspirar a ser un poemario o un libro de poemas, pero prefiere que se le conozca como un catálogo; una enumeración de objetos, ideas y situaciones que se encuentran, como dijo Rosa Montero, “al otro lado de tus párpados”.
Marcos sin retratos by Hugo Ríos Cordero
Con una prosa transparente y sencilla, Hugo Ríos-Cordero logra en Marcos sin retratos presentar un lado siniestro de la realidad. Esta colección de 30 relatos, en la cual se pueden sentir los ecos de Poe y de Cortázar, explora el detalle de lo cotidiano desde un punto de vista que podría llamarse “gótico urbano”. Las narraciones del joven escritor permiten que la fatalidad se cierna sobre el texto con un abuso exacto y necesario de la narración en primera persona. Muchos de estos breves cuentos postergan la revelación hasta el último instante para así sorprender al lector el cual participa de este modo de la misma suerte que los personajes. Con este libro se anuncia una voz significativa en la nueva narrativa puertorriqueña.
Beowulf on Film Adaptations and Variations by Nickolas A. Haydock and E. L. Risden
Why did the most read work in English literature go without cinematic adaptation for so long? And why did five major film treatments appear between 1999 and 2008? This book explores the growing number of films based on the Old English epic poem Beowulf, and furthers the ongoing consideration of filmic medievalism. Will the powerful influence of cinema affect the future reception of this great cultural, linguistic and inherently visual work? The films inevitably sway away from not only the story but also from the themes and concerns of the original to those more interesting to the filmmakers–or responsive to the zeitgeist. They measure the pulse of our inherited notions of heroism and teach us more about our own times than about the epic from which they derive.
Situational Poetics in Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid by Nickolas A. Haydock
“Situational Poetics is a deep, cultural history of Henryson’s problematic Testament of Cresseid. This book offers wonderful insights throughout, from its analysis of the hybrid “dislocations and double consciousness” of late medieval Scottish literature, Henryson’s “Virgilian” career, his admixture of tragedy and satire in the Testament, and the anamorphic temporalities that link Chaucer, Henryson and Shakespeare in their telling and re-telling of the Troilus and Criseyde story. This is an utterly compelling study of Henryson’s Testament, one that promises to re-shape completely our understanding of the poem.” –Stephanie Trigg, Professor of English, University of Melbourne “A remarkably ambitious attempt to re-situate Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid within literary history and to recover the author’s deliberately constructed career-profile from the many accidents of transmission. … the first ever view of Henryson “in the round.” –Tom Shippey, Professor Emeritus, St. Louis University “Nickolas Haydock’s new book on the great Scot poet Robert Henryson manages to do several things at once that seemed to the rest of us to be incompatible. He firmly places Henryson’s work in literary history, but renders him accessible and even in dialogue with new ways of thinking about literature and culture. He is respectful of Henryson’s canonical place in Scottish identity but raises questions about how literature works in making national and ethnic identities. Haydock gives us a Henryson for the twenty-first century.” –John M. Ganim, Professor of English, University of California, Riverside
Hollywood in the Holy Land Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes edited by Nickolas A. Haydock and L. E. Risden
This collection of essays analyzes film representations of the Crusades, other medieval East/West encounters, and the modern inheritance of encounters between orientalist fantasy and apocalyptic conspiracy. From studies of the filmic representations of popular figures such as El Cid, Roland, Richard I, and Saladin to examinations of such topics as Templar romance and the role of set design, location and landscape, the essays make significant contributions to our understanding of orientalist medievalism in film.
Movie Medievalism The Imaginary Middle Ages by Nickolas A. Haydock
This work offers a theoretical introduction to the portrayal of medievalism in popular film. Employing the techniques of film criticism and theory, it moves beyond the simple identification of error toward a poetics of this type of film, sensitive to both cinema history and to the role these films play in constructing what the author terms the “medieval imaginary.”
The opening two chapters introduce the rapidly burgeoning field of medieval film studies, viewed through the lenses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Deleuzian philosophy of the time-image. The first chapter explores how a vast array of films (including both auteur cinema and popular movies) contributes to the modern vision of life in the Middle Ages, while the second is concerned with how time itself functions in cinematic representations of the medieval. The remaining five chapters offer detailed considerations of specific examples of representations of medievalism in recent films, including First Knight, A Knight’s Tale, The Messenger The Story of Joan of Arc, Kingdom of Heaven, King Arthur, Night Watch, and The Da Vinci Code. The book also surveys important benchmarks in the development of Deleuze’s time-image, from classic examples like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Kurosawa’s Kagemusha through contemporary popular cinema, in order to trace how movie medievalism constructs images of the multivalence of time in memory and representation.
Reading African American Autobiography Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism by Eric D. Lamore
This timely volume embraces and interprets the increasingly broad and deep canon of life narratives by African Americans. The contributors discover and recover neglected lives, texts, and genres, enlarge the wide range of critical methods used by scholars to study these works, and expand the understanding of autobiography to encompass photography, comics, blogs, and other modes of self-expression. This book also examines at length the proliferation of African American autobiography in the twenty-first century, noting the roles of digital genres, remediated lives, celebrity lives, self-help culture, non-Western religious traditions, and the politics of adoption.
The life narratives studied range from an eighteenth-century criminal narrative, a 1918 autobiography, and the works of Richard Wright to new media, graphic novels, and a celebrity memoir from Pam Grier.
Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives edited by Eric D. Lamore
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) is one of the most frequently and heatedly discussed texts in the canon of eighteenth-century transatlantic literature written in English. Equiano’s Narrative contains an engrossing account of the author’s experiences in Africa, the Americas, and Europe as he sought freedom from bondage and became a leading figure in the abolitionist movement. While scholars have approached this sophisticated work from diverse critical and historical/biographical perspectives, there has been, until now, little written about the ways in which it can be successfully taught in the twenty-first-century classroom.
In this collection of essays, most of them never before published, sixteen teacher-scholars focus explicitly on the various classroom contexts in which the Narrative can be assigned and various pedagogical strategies that can be used to help students understand the text and its complex cultural, intellectual, literary, and historical implications. The contributors explore topics ranging from the religious dimensions of Equiano’s rhetoric and controversies about his origins, specifically whether he was actually born in Africa and endured the Middle Passage, to considerations of the Narrative’s place in American Literature survey courses and how it can be productively compared to other texts, including captivity narratives and modern works of fiction. They not only suggest an array of innovative teaching models but also offer new readings of the work that have been overlooked in Equiano studies and Slavery studies. With these two dimensions, this volume will help ensure that conversations over Equiano’s eighteenth-century autobiography remain relevant and engaging to today’s students.
New Essays on Phillis Wheatley edited by John C. Shields and Eric D. Lamore
The first African American to publish a book on any subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) has long been denigrated by literary critics who refused to believe that a black woman could produce such dense, intellectual work, let alone influence Romantic-period giants like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson once declared that “the compositions published under her name are below dignity of criticism.” In recent decades, however, Wheatley’s work has come under new scrutiny as the literature of the eighteenth century and the impact of African American literature have been reconceived. In these never-before-published essays, fourteen prominent Wheatley scholars consider her work from a variety of angles, affirming her rise into the first rank of American writers.
The pieces in the first section show that perhaps the most substantial measure of Wheatley’s multilayered texts resides in her deft handling of classical materials. The contributors consider Wheatley’s references to Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics and to the feminine figure Dido as well as her subversive critique of white readers attracted to her adaptation of familiar classics. They also discuss Wheatley’s use of the Homeric Trojan horse and eighteenth-century verse to mask her ambitions for freedom and her treatment of the classics as political tools.
Engaging Wheatley’s multilayered texts with innovative approaches, the essays in the second section recontextualize her rich manuscripts and demonstrate how her late-eighteenth-century works remain both current and timeless. They ponder Wheatley’s verse within the framework of queer theory, the concepts of political theorist Hannah Arendt, rhetoric, African studies, eighteenth-century “salon culture,” and the theoretics of imagination.
Together, these essays reveal the depth of Phillis Wheatley’s literary achievement and present concrete evidence that her extant oeuvre merits still further scrutiny.
Murder at Crimson Manor by Gabriel Romaguera
Lexi is a bright teenager trying to navigate through the problems of college life, like getting her schedule in order and surviving academic group work on her own. She also has to deal with roommates like no other, including a potential robot/vampire/ninja, an aspiring actress (plus her secret live-in boyfriend) and the embodiment of annoyance. Lexi does her best to survive but when push comes to shove (literally) her present, and future are put into jeopardy. This dark comedy depicts how good friends don’t let a little thing like accidental premeditated murder get in the way of education and living your best life. This novel is inspired by real people, a really creepy house, and a realistic dream that changed everything.