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Postcolonial Approaches to Latin American Children's Literature.
Spanish Vampire Fiction from 1900 to the Present Day by Spanish Vampire Fiction since 1900: Blood Relations, as that subtitle suggests, makes the case for considering Spanish vampire fiction an index of the complex relationship between intercultural phenomena and the specifics of a time, place, and author. Supernatural beings that drink blood are found in folklore worldwide, Spain included, and writers ranging from the most canonical to the most marginal have written vampire stories, Spanish ones included too. When they do, they choose between various strategies of characterization or blend different ones together. How much will they draw on conventions of the transnational corpus? Are their vampires to be local or foreign; alluring or repulsive; pitiable or pure evil, for instance? Decisions like these determine the messages texts carry and, when made by Spanish authors, may reveal aspects of their culture with striking candidness, perhaps because the fantasy premise seems to give the false sense of security that this is harmless escapism and, since metaphorical meaning is implicit, it is open to argument and, if necessary, denial. Part I gives a chronological text-by-text appreciation of all the texts included in this volume, many of them little known even to Hispanists and few if any to non-Spanish Gothic scholars. It also provides a plot summary and brief background on the author of each. These entries are free-standing and designed to be consulted for reference or read together to give a sense of the evolution of the paradigm since 1900. Part II considers the corpus comparatively, first with regard to its relationship to folklore and religion and then contagion and transmission. Spanish Vampire Fiction since 1900: Blood Relationswill be of interest to Anglophone Gothic scholars who want to develop their knowledge of the Spanish dimension of the mode and to Hispanists who want to look at some canonical texts and authors from a new perspective but also gain an awareness of some interesting and decidedly non-canonical material.
Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature by This collection considers the multiplicity and instability of medieval French literary identity, arguing that it is fluid and represented in numerous ways. The works analyzed span genres?epic, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography, fabliaux?and historical periods from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. Contributors examine the complexity of the notion of self through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of voice and naming. Studying a variety of texts?including Conte du Graal, Roman de la Rose, Huon de Bordeaux, and the Oxford Roland?they conceptualize the Other Within as an individual who simultaneously exists within a group while remaining foreign to it. They explore the complex interactions between and among individuals and groups, and demonstrate how identity can be imposed and self-imposed not only by characters but by authors and audiences. Taken together, these essays highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, and underscore both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they initially appear. Contributors: Adrian P. Tudor | Kristin L. Burr | William Burgwinkle | Jane Gilbert | Francis Gingras | Sara I. James | Douglas Kelly | Mary Jane Schenck | James R. Simpson | Jane H.M. Taylor
Modern Italian Grammar Workbook by This is an innovative book of exercises and language tasks for all learners of Italian, which can be used independently or alongside Modern Italian Grammar. Divided into three sections, this highly useful text includes: exercises based on essential grammatical structures everyday functions practice such as making introductions and expressing needs realistic role plays in short scenes, set in a range of different contexts. Implementing feedback from its predecessor, this updated second edition features exercises graded on a three-point scale according to their level of difficulty and cross-referencing to the Modern Italian Grammar for each. Also containing a comprehensive answer key for checking progress, this is a complete reference work suitable for both class-use and self-study.
The Fourth Estate at the Fourth Wall by New media are often greeted with suspicion by older media. The Fourth Estate at the Fourth Wall explores how, when the commercial press arrived in France in 1836, popular theater critiqued its corruption, its diluted politics, and its tendency to orient its content toward the lowest common denominator. July Monarchy plays, which provided affordable entertainment to a broad section of the public, constitute a large, nearly untapped reservoir of commentary on the arrival of the forty-franc press. Vaudevilles and comedies ask whether journalism that benefits from advertisement can be unbiased. Dramas explore whether threatening to spread false news is an acceptable way for journalists to exercise their influence. Hollinshead-Strick uses both plays and novels to show that despite their claims to enlighten their readers, newspapers were often accused of obscuring public access to information. Balzac's interventions in this media sphere reveal his utopian views on print technology. Nerval's and Pyat's demonstrate the nefarious impact that corrupt theater critics could have on authors and on the public alike. Scholars of press and media studies, French literature, theater, and nineteenth-century literature more generally will find this book a valuable introduction to a cross-genre debate about press publicity that remains surprisingly resonant today.
Revisiting the French Resistance in Cinema, Literature, Bande Dessinée, and Television (1942-2012) by Revisiting the French Resistance in Cinema, Literature, Bande Dessin e, and Television (1942-2012) examines how fictional works have contributed to shaping the image of the French Resistance, and offers a key to understanding France's national psyche. Christophe Corbin explores themes including the making of the myth of an honorable country united against a common enemy, comedies gently poking fun at it and fictional works debunking it straightforwardly, the invisibility and resurfacing of women in films and novels, as well as contemporary depictions of the Resistance on television. Case studies include sometimes forgotten or lesser-known works such as Aragon's wartime poetry, early films such as Le P re tranquille or Casablanca-inspired Fortunat, iconic films and novels such as Le Silence de la mer or La Grande Vadrouille, but also contemporary fictional works such as Effroyables jardins and Un H ros tr s discret, or the popular TV series Un Village fran ais. It will be of interest to scholars and students in cultural studies, film studies, French studies, history, and media studies.
Medieval Iberian crusade fiction and the Mediterranean world by 
Four Key Plays by In addition to a substantial introduction to the life and works of Federico García Lorca--avant-garde poet, playwright, and soul of Spain's "Generation of '27"--this collection features vibrant new English translations of four of his plays. The legacy of a dramatic, religious, and social iconoclast whose death made him a martyr of the left in Civil-War Spain and who today is embraced as a gay icon shines through in Michael Kidd's stage-worthy renderings of Yerma , Blood Wedding , The House of Bernarda Alba , and a more experimental play, The Audience , a kaleidoscopic exploration of sexual identity and theater.
The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man by New translations of the best stories by the one of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential writers Kafka, whose name has generated an adjective, is one of the best loved writers of the twentieth century. Known for his dark, enigmatic stories, for the absurd nightmares he depicts, his extraordinary imaginative depth is clear in stories from 'A Hunger Artist' to 'The Verdict'. But Kafka also wrote fizzingly funny, fresh stories, and The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man contains all the aspects of this genius: the wit and the grit; the horror and the humour; the longing and the laughing. They range from bizarre, two-sentence stories about Don Quixote to the famous brutal depiction of violence and justice that is 'In the Penal Colony'. In a nimble new translation by the acclaimed Alexander Starritt, this collection of Kafka's essential stories shows the genius at his very best.
Ivy by Annesa, one of Grazia Deledda's most enigmatic and dramatic characters, battles with a guilt she suffers when her own strength tempts her to a crime that will save others who won't save themselves. Annesa has tragically attached herself to the tree of the Decherchi family, once noble but now dry-rotting on hard times. Her lover, Paulu Decherchi, compares her to a suffocating ivy clinging to the dead trunk. Distraught almost to the point of madness, Annesa finally cuts herself free from her adopted family. Escaping arrest for a wealthy relative's death -- and fleeing the men who dictate the laws that control the lives of women and the poor -- she imposes her own punishment of exile. But she will return to the impoverished Decherchis to complete her penance after she has purified her soul and found her own peace. Annesa's fate and destiny are co-joined to the wild Sardinian landscape, described in Ivy with a passion only hinted at in Deledda's other works. Its brooding and wild mountains scarred with haunted caves create an atmosphere weighed down by poverty, prejudice, and ill omen. Many consider Ivy to be Deledda's best work, surpassing even Elias Portolu and Reeds in the Wind (Canne al vento). Here she deeply probes the misguided but altruistic motivation of a woman totally dependent on others who lack her own moral fortitude. Deledda won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, writing fiction set in Sardinia, mining it deeply and evoking its people and their character. Ivy, Deledda's third novel, was originally published in 1908 in Italian as L'Edera and has never been previously published in English. First English translation. Introduction, notes, bibliography. 198 pages.
Flowers over the Inferno by Ilaria Tuti's debut thriller explores a remote community in Northern Italy--a place of secrets, eerie folktales, and primal instincts. In a quiet village surrounded by ancient woods and the imposing Italian Alps, a man is found naked with his eyes gouged out. It is the first in a string of gruesome murders. Superintendent Teresa Battaglia, a detective with a background in criminal profiling, is called to investigate. Battaglia is in her mid-sixties, her rank and expertise hard-won from decades of battling for respect in a male-dominated Italian police force. While she's not sure she trusts the young city inspector assigned to assist her, she sees right away that this is no ordinary case: buried deep in these mountains is a dark history that may endanger a group of eight-year-old children toward whom the killer seems to gravitate. As Teresa inches closer to the truth, she must also confront the possibility that her body and mind, worn down by age and illness, may fail her before the chase is over.
Maps and Territories by The rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life has meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging, as once familiar, local environments are increasinglyde-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. Maps and Territories identifies such preoccupations as a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel. Indeed, like France itself, the protagonists of its best fiction are constantly called upon torenegotiate their identity in order to maintain any sense of belonging within the troubled territories they call home. Maps and Territories reads today's French novel for how it re-maps such territories, and for how it positions its protagonists vis-a-vis the pressures of globalization, uncoveringpreviously unseen affinities amongst, and offering fresh readings of - and offering exciting new perspectives on - a diverse set of authors: namely, Michel Houellebecq, Chloe Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq. Inthe process, it sets the literary works into dialogue with a range of today's most influential theorists of postmodernity and globalization, including Paul Virilio, Marc Auge, Peter Sloterdijk, Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, Edward Casey, David Harvey, and Ursula K. Heise.
Beyond Return by In the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), "contemporary" French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-centuryFrench literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the "return to the story". In Beyond Return, Lucas Hollister proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels,radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, Hollister shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of "return", and thus redraw in different manners the boundariesof the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Hollister argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the "return to the story" in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.
China Dream by "Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" âe*Margaret Atwood, via Twitter Blending fact and fiction,China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. This darkly comic fable exposes the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth. It is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state-imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today. "[M]ay be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma's talent for probing the country's darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party's moral failings." âe*Mike Ives,The New York Times
Boccaccian Renaissance by A Boccaccian Renaissance brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars in diverse national traditions to respond to the largely unaddressed question of Boccaccio?s impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe. Martin Eisner and David Lummus co-edit the first comprehensive examination in English of Boccaccio?s impact on the Renaissance. The essays investigate what it means to follow a Boccaccian model, in tandem with or in place of ancient authors such as Vergil or Cicero, or modern poets such as Dante or Petrarch. The book probes how deeply the Latin and vernacular works of Boccaccio spoke to the Renaissance humanists of the fifteenth century. It treats not only the literary legacy of Boccaccio?s works but also their paradoxical importance for the history of the Italian language and reception in theater and books of conduct. While the geographical focus of many of the essays is on Italy, the volume concludes with three studies that open new inroads to understanding his influence on Spanish, French, and English writers across the sixteenth century. The book will appeal strongly to scholars and students of Boccaccio, the Italian and European Renaissance, and Italian literature. Contributors: Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Rhiannon Daniels, Martin Eisner, Simon Gilson, James Hankins, Timothy Kircher, Victoria Kirkham, David Lummus, Ronald L. Martinez, Ignacio Navarrete, Brian Richardson, Marc Schachter, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr
The Art of Time by Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question "what should I do?" has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that "the ethical" is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas's voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or "otherness," which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness. Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain; and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
A Calm Fire by In these times of heartbreaking violence, clashing religions, and a seemingly never-ending narrative of dichotomy between East and West, wonder at the religion and culture of the Middle East can be in short supply. However, the lyrical and philosophical travel writing in Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet's Calm Fire rekindles it, lifting us out of our ordinary locales and stories of violent conflict in the Middle East. Jaccottet's poetic descriptions explore the rich cultural worlds of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Israel, giving us uncommon glimpses into countries so often associated with turmoil, death and destruction. Expressing a poet's admiration for the ecstasies of faith and a philosopher's skepticism of these seemingly transformative feelings, Jaccottet dives deep into the religious cultures of the places he visits. Ultimately, whether in his native Swiss Alps or among the cedars of Lebanon, the same question pervades Philippe Jaccottet's work: How should we live? More than a simple palliative to a depressing news cycle, Calm Fire captures a true sense of place by celebrating and pondering ways of life through the immersive experience of travel.
Dark Constellations by Argentinian literary star Pola Oloixarac's visionary new novel races from the world of 19th-century science to an ultra-surveilled near future, exploring humanity's quest for knowledge and control, and leaping forward to the next steps in human evolution. Canary Islands, 1882: Caught in the 19th-century mania for scientific classification, explorer and plant biologist Niklas Bruun researches Crissia pallida, a species alleged to have hallucinogenic qualities capable of eliminating the psychic limits between one human mind and another. Buenos Aires, 1983: Born to a white Argentinian anthropologist and a black Brazilian engineer, Cassio comes of age with the Internet and becomes a prominent hacker, riding the wave of transformations brought about by distributed networks, mass surveillance, and new flows of globalized capital. The southern Argentinian techno-hub of Bariloche, 2024: A research group works on a project that will allow the Ministry of Genetics to track every movement of the country's citizens without their knowledge or consent, using sensors that identify DNA at a distance. But the new technology contains within it the seeds of a far more radical transformation of human life and civilization. In a novel of towering ambition, Oloixarac's complexly intertwining stories reveal the power that resides in the world's most deeply shadowed spaces.
Intimate Ties by First published in 1911, Intimate Ties is Robert Musil's second book, consisting of two novellas, 'The Culmination of Love' and 'The Temptation of Silent Veronica.' Each revolves around a troubled woman in the throes of her sexual and romantic woes, as their memories of the past return to influence their present desires. Musil tracks the psyche of his protagonists in a blurring of impressions that is reflected in his experimental prose. Intimate Ties offers the reader an early glimpse of the high modernist style Musil would perfect in his magnum opus The Man Without Qualities.
Selected Poems by Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Latinx Studies. Edited by Tony Frazer. Translated by Michael Smith, Luis Ingelmo, Tony Frazer, Eliot Weinberger. This selected edition presents an overview of all of Huidobro's work, from 1914 until 1948, when his final, posthumous volume was published, moving from the early symbolist work, through the high avant-garde phase towards the end of the First World War, then through Altazor and Temblor de cielo, the highpoint of his career (both published in 1931), and on into the quieter late poetry which synthesises the previous work and settles down into a post-vanguard style. Also included are two manifestos and two interviews with the author.
The Struggle for Understanding by An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel's writings, from his earliest works to his final novels.
Occidentalism, Maghrebi Literature and the East-West Encounter by Maghrebi literature published in the first half of the twentieth century is a subject that seldom receives focused scholarly treatment. This is partly due to limited availability of the books, some of which were printed in as few as fifty copies. Zahia Smail Salhi tracked down these rare worksand put them in the spotlight for the first time here. Through close textual analysis and in-depth engagement with religious and socio-political contexts, Smail Salhi determines whether these texts belong to a collective formation we may call 'Occidentalism'. In so doing, this book reintegrates thepre-1945 Maghrebi novels into the history and study of modern Arabic literature.
Sinography: the Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script by In the more than 3,000 years since its invention, the Chinese script has been adapted many times to write languages other than Chinese, including Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Zhuang. In Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, Zev Handel provides a comprehensive analysis of how the structural features of these languages constrained and motivated methods of script adaptation. This comparative study reveals the universal principles at work in the borrowing of logographic scripts. By analyzing and explaining these principles, Handel advances our understanding of how early writing systems have functioned and spread, providing a new framework that can be applied to the history of scripts beyond East Asia, such as Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform.Sometimes it can be useful to look at Google Books to get an idea of what kind of books you might be interested in. You can then search the LMU Catalog to see if we have these titles, or use Link+ if we do not.
