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Imagining Manila
The city of Manila is uniquely significant to Philippine, Southeast Asian and world history. It played a key role in the rise of Western colonial mercantilism in Asia, the extinction of the Spanish Empire and the ascendancy of the USA to global imperial hegemony, amongst other events. This book examines British and American writing on the city, situating these representations within scholarship on empire, orientalism and US, Asian and European political history. Through analysis of novels, memoirs, travelogues and journalism written about Manila by Westerners since the early eighteenth century, Tom Sykes builds a picture of Western attitudes towards the city and the wider Philippines, and the mechanics by which these came to dominate the discourse. This study uncovers to what extent Western literary tropes and representational models have informed understandings of the Philippines, in the West and elsewhere, and the types of counter-narrative which have emerged in the Philippines in response to them.
Multiculturalism, Multilingualism and the Self: Literature and Culture Studies
This edited collection explores the conjunction of multiculturalism and the self in literature and culture studies, and brings together essays by prominent researchers interested in literature and culture whose critical perspectives inform discussions of specific examples of multicultural contexts in which individuals and communities strive to maintain their identities. The book is divided into two major parts, the first of which comprises literary representations of multiculturalism and discussions of its impasses and impacts in fictional circumstances. In turn, the second part primarily focuses on culture at large and real-life consequences. Taken together, the two complementary parts offer an illuminating and well-rounded overview of representations of multiculturalism in literature and contemporary culture from a variety of critical perspectives.
Fantasy Literature and Christianity
The debate surrounding the Christian aspects of C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter has revealed not only the prominence of religious themes in fantasy fiction, but also readers' concerns over portrayals of religion in fantasy. Yet while analyses of these works fill many volumes, other fantasy series have received much less attention. This critical study explores the fantastic religions and religious themes in American and Canadian works by Stephen R. Donaldson (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), Guy Gavriel Kay (Fionavar Tapestry), Celia S. Friedman (Coldfire Trilogy), and Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn). References to biblical tradition and Christian teachings reveal these writers' overall approach to Christianity and the relationship between Christianity and the fantasy genre.
Diversity and Homogeneity
Diversity and Homogeneity explores current issues related to the nation, ethnicity and gender in literature, film, media and theatrical performance in both the UK and the USA. Employing a broad research framework, it investigates the problematics of migration, nomadism, nationhood, citizenship, patriotism, terrorism, totalitarianism, social and racial equality, as well as masculinity and femininity in modern multicultural societies. Keenly attuned to questions of alterity, social and cultural fluidity, and heterogeneous forms of identity, yet also sensitive to contemporary unifying tendencies informing an increasingly globalized world, the volume’s contributions critically interrogate and challenge the traditional notions attached to the three overarching categories of the book’s title.
Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader
[In this book, the] essays illuminate the crucial episodes, characters, style, language, and concpets central to Tolkien's complex world.-Dust jacket.
The Epistemological Perspective of the Pearl-Poet
Original and engaging, this study presents the four anonymous poems found in the Cotton Nero MS - Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - as a composite text with a continuous narrative. While it is widely accepted that the poems attributed to the Pearl-Poet ought to be read together, this book demonstrates that instead of being analyzed as four distinct, though interconnected, textual entities, they ought to be studied as a single literary unit that produces meaning through its own intricate internal structure. Piotr Spyra defines the epistemological thought of Saint Augustine as an interpretive key which, when applied to the composite text of the manuscript, reveals a fabric of thematic continuity. This book ultimately provides the reader with a clear sense of the poet's perspective on the nature of human knowledge as well as its moral implications and with a deeper understanding of how the poems bring the theological and philosophical problems of the Middle Ages to bear on the individual human experience.
The Surplus of Culture
This multifaceted volume presents the elusive surplus of culture in the spotlight of theory and academic practice. Despite its overtly economic implications, the concept alludes to the added value of sense, common sense and nonsense which is represented as languages of irony, irrationality and absurdity potentially subverting traditional and mainstream “regimes” of culture. Consequently, the “moment of surplus” is inherent in critical interpretation in which supposedly well-entrenched notions suddenly reveal their implicitly shattering and subversive nature. The surplus of culture dwells at the risky intersection of untamed interpretation and tradition. It is the space of the “third” in which literary canons are re-visited, language reveals its hidden political agendas, the Orient reclaims its own cognitive perspective and established structures of cognition are questioned in the tragic-comic gesture of insight. The volume is a must for scholars and researchers in the fields of cultural studies, literature and arts as well as literary theory.
Simple Forms
Simple Forms is a study of popular or folk literature in the medieval period. Focusing both on the vast body of oral literature that lies behind the written texts which have survived from the medieval period and on the popular literature provided by literate authors for audiences of hearers or readers with varying degrees of literacy, Douglas Gray leads new readers to a productively complicated understanding of the relationship between medieval popular culture and the culture of the learned. He argues that medieval society was stratified, in what seems to us a rigid way, but that culturally it was more flexible. Literary topics, themes, and forms moved; there was much borrowing, and a constant interaction. Popular tales, motifs, and ideas passed into learned or courtly works; learned forms and attitudes made their way in into popular culture. All in all this seems to have been a fruitful symbiosis. The book's twelve chapters are principally organised genre, covering epics, ballads, popular romances, folktales, the German sage, legends, animal tales and fables, proverbs, riddles, satires, songs, and drama.
