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Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways. Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the contributing authors highlight the ...
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was brutally killed at the hands of the police. Amplified by Donald Trump’s handling of the incident, Floyd’s death caused what some would term as a “racial reckoning”—a reckoning that pervaded different parts of American and even international life. As Floyd was killed during an arrest, the matter of public safety did not escape this reckoning, prompting some to call for the defunding of law enforcement and to question what is truly meant by safety in society. In Safe Space Rhetoric and Race in the Academy: A Reckoning, James Noel contends that national discussions about safety should not be excluded from conversations about safety in academia. Noel examines the presence of safe space rhetoric in academia and illustrates the ways that designating safe spaces can be a panacea for chronic institutional problems groups on campus may face. The book unflinchingly interrogates what it means to be safe in academia in the hope to find a starting place for radical possibility.
This volume explores the world that shaped Henry James’s work and influenced his legacy through the themes of Jamesian cultural anxiety between and beyond spatio-temporal boundaries. As such, each chapter constructs a mode of reading to map and formulate one’s own cultural perspective in various contexts relying on their unique engagement with James’s and Jamesian creative acts of writing—aesthetics and science, the (auto-)biographical as social aspects, genre as literary-social context, the artistic and the economic, editorship and readership, and Asian perspectives on cultural influences and identities—to generate insights and establish new intercultural understandings. These are the traces of the contributors’ national, social, cultural consciousness that allow the definition of the Jamesian worldview as a particularly universal one in a global context.
Drawing on a range of authors that includes Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith, Tom McCarthy, Jennifer Egan and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book provides an innovative and original analysis of the interdependencies between digital technology and metamodernism through a detailed study of the contemporary novel. We are currently living through a period of profound rupture, in which the way the world is perceived is undergoing significant change. Just as the interplay between capitalism and technology hastened the evolution of modernism and postmodernism, then so too are those same forces now taking us into uncharted waters. In an increasingly fragile world, in which the very existence of humankind is threatened, it is vital that we begin to understand this new landscape.
In this new volume of letters, readers are invited to meet Olivia Louise Langdon Clemens on her own terms, in her own voice—as complementary partner to her world-famous spouse, Mark Twain, and as enduring friend, mother to four children, world traveler, and much more. The frail woman often portrayed by scholars, biographers, and Twain himself is largely absent in these letters. Instead, Olivia (who Twain affectionately referred to as “Gravity” in their early correspondence) emerges as a resilient and energetic nineteenth-century woman, her family’s source and center of stability, and a well of private and public grace in an ever-changing landscape. Mark Twain’s biography recounted in Olivia’s letters offers new insights, and her captivating voice is certain to engage and enlighten readers.
Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materials—including previously unexamined marginalia in books from Clemens’s personal library—Driscoll charts the development of the writer’s ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life, from antebellum Hannibal, Missouri, and the Sierra Neva...
Setting out a history of cyberspace and its relationship with the discipline that was to become digital humanities, this book is an account of an often-forgotten period of internet history in the 1990s when this medium was in its infancy. It provides a detailed account of the concepts of 'cyberspace' and the 'virtual', which were characteristic of a perception that using the internet allowed users to enter a separate space from everyday life- a world elsewhere. In doing so, it argues that this libertarian idea of the internet framed it as a new frontier, where the rules of the everyday world did not and should not apply, and where the individual could find freedom. These early norms and the regrettable lack of regulation that was a consequence of them, this book argues, contributed to many of current issues with internet media. including of toxic communication, disinformation and over-commercialisation
The first critical survey of its kind devoted solely to literary evaluation Companion to Literary Evaluation bridges the gap between the non-academic literary world, where evaluation is deeply ingrained, and the world of academia, where evaluation is rarely considered. Encouraging readers to formulate and articulate arguments that balance instinctive judgment and reasoned assessment, this unique volume addresses key issues regarding literary values from the perspective of analytical aesthetics and the philosophy of literature. Bringing together a diverse panel of contributors, the Companion explores competing theories of literary evaluation, the reasons for evaluating theater and lyric poetr...
This critical edition publishes--for the first time anywhere--the original manuscript and revised versions of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Mark Twain's story of the antebellum South, first published in 1894, continues to prompt conversations about race and the dire legacy of American slavery. At its heart is Roxy, a mixed-race woman enslaved to a wealthy Missouri family. To save her infant son (whose father was white) from being "sold down the river," Roxy switches him in the cradle with her master's son, setting in motion a train of ironic and bitter events. With its mixture of farce, social commentary, tragedy, and satire, Pudd'nhead Wilson has come to be one of Mark Twain's most-read and most-studi...
This volume analyses the representation of domestic spaces in landmark texts of American literature, focusing on the relationship between houses and subjectivities, and illustrates the necessity and benefits of integrating materiality and housing research into the field of literary studies.