Bücher der Reihe Series in Literary Studies

While much has been written about Chuck Palahniuk and his body of work, next to nothing has been written about when, where and how it is necessary to teach Palahniuk. This collection will reveal that teaching Palahniuk's work and the discursive dynamic of the classroom interactions create new opportunities for scholarship by both the faculty member and his or her students. Despite early critical success with 'Fight Club', 'Invisible Monsters', and 'Choke', Palahniuk's novels are increasingly dismissed for the very transgressive content that makes them essential pedagogical tools in the Age of Trump where "truth isn't truth," and tribalism is stoked with claims of "fake news". This collection aims to broaden the scholarship by examining under-represented and unrepresented works from his oeuvre and situating them in the context of their pedagogical implications. In both form and content, the transgressive nature of Palahniuk's work demands critical thought and reflection, capacities that are necessary for the preservation of a democratic society.Contributors take various approaches to address what students can learn about writing, literature, and society by reading and analyzing Palahniuk's texts. The collection will discuss the value of teaching Palahniuk, innovations and various disciplinary contexts for teaching his works, and reflections on some of those pedagogical opportunities. Through its multi-faceted discussion of Palahniuk and pedagogy, this collection will legitimize efforts to bring his work onto syllabi and into the classroom, where it can enhance student engagement, create new avenues for inter-disciplinary scholarship, and re-invigorate an expansion of the canon. It will also provide diverse frameworks for incorporating and interpreting Palahniuk's writing across disciplines. Finally, the collection will offer post-mortems from faculty members who have found the "guts" to teach Palahniuk and will offer insight into what students have gained and stand to gain from a more intensive Palahniuk pedagogy.

Vincent Sheean, a groundbreaking American foreign correspondent and author, is known for reporting from Europe, North Africa, and Asia, writing news reports, articles, and books. A few books and articles have described Vincent Sheean's life, and briefly discussed his major nonfiction books. However, no book-length study or article has closely examined his nonfiction books. 'Seeking to Understand the World: Literary Journalism of Vincent Sheean', textually analyzes his five nonfiction, journalistic books to examine them for characteristics of literary journalism. Spanning nearly the entirety of his journalistic career, these books include 'Personal History' (1935), 'Not Peace but a Sword' (1939), 'Between the Thunder and the Sun' (1943), 'Lead, Kindly Light' (1949), and 'Nehru: The Years of Power' (1960). Set in different world areas, the books illuminate events as disparate as the Riffian war, the Spanish Civil War, the infamous Munich pact, the Nazi bombing of London, and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Sheean's books provide an in-depth, personal look at these and related events. This book includes analysis of Sheean's works, finding that they have several prominent characteristics of literary journalism: stories and scenes, cohesive structure, lifelike characters, vivid description, well-crafted sentences, immersive reporting, among others.

This volume delves into the literary lives of four Muslim women in pre-modern India. Three of them, Gulbadan Begam (1523-1603), the youngest daughter of Emperor Babur, Jahanara (1614-1681), the eldest daughter of Emperor Shah Jahan, and Zeb-un-Nissa (1638-1702), the eldest daughter of Emperor Aurangzeb, belonged to royalty. Thus, they were inhabitants of the Mughal 'zenana', an enigmatic liminal space of qualified autonomy and complex equations of gender politics. Amidst such constructs, Gulbadan Begam's 'Humayun-Nama' (biography of her half-brother Humayun, reflecting on the lives of Babur's wives and daughters), Jahanara's hagiographies glorifying Mughal monarchy, and Zeb-un-Nissa's free-spirited poetry that landed her in Aurangzeb's prison, are discursive literary outputs from a position of gendered subalternity. While the subjective selves of these women never much surfaced under extant rigid conventions, their indomitable understanding of 'home-world' antinomies determinedly emerge from their works. This monograph explores the political imagination of these Mughal women that was constructed through statist interactions of their royal fathers and brothers, and how such knowledge percolated through the relatively cloistered communal life of the 'zenana'. The fourth woman, Habba Khatoon (1554-1609), famously known as 'the Nightingale of Kashmir', offers an interesting counterpoint to her royal peers. As a common woman who married into royalty (her husband Yusuf Shah Chak was the ruler of Kashmir in 1579-1586), her happiness was short-lived with her husband being treacherously exiled by Emperor Akbar. Khatoon's verse, which voices the pangs of separation, was that of an ascetic who allegedly roamed the valley, and is famed to have introduced the 'lol' (lyric) into Kashmiri poetry. Across genres and social positions of all these writers, this volume intends to cast hitherto unfocused light on the emergent literary sensibilities shown by Muslim women in pre-modern India.

'Rewriting Resistance: Caste and Gender in Indian Literature' explores the claustrophobic shadow of discrimination hanging over Indian women and lower caste people from ancient times. It examines how different literary figures paint a vivid and descriptive picture of the physical and psychological oppression faced throughout India. The book traces feminist resistance, subaltern resistance, and resistance during the anti-colonial struggle, with the literary outputs discussed working as socio-political activity against dominant ideologies. The volume further talks about the responsibility, not only of those oppressed, but also of us as human beings, to speak out against the violation of human rights and for justice. So, the book focuses on the literary writers who always dream of a better India where all people, regardless of their caste, class and gender, can live and breathe freely. The book is divided into three parts. Part I describes the plight of women, their commodification and the politics around them, and how they fight hard to regain their faded identity. Part II depicts the interesting findings on gender-caste intersections and discrimination. Part III explores the struggle of the low caste, specifically male members of Dalit community, along with their history. It further portrays how orthodoxy in rituals creates the burden of traditional and existential crises. 'Rewriting Resistance: Caste and Gender in Indian Literature' re-visits Indian literary texts in terms of what they reveal about the resistance registered through the suffering of human beings (women and Dalits) at the hands of fellow human beings, and further links the discussion to our contemporary situation. The book has a unique quality in that it is not only a detailed study of select Indian English texts, but also delves into an in-depth analysis of texts from Bengali, Urdu, and Hindi literature. The work is likely to affect and appeal to students, scholars and academics, and can be adopted for classroom teaching and research purposes as well.

This book is a collection of essays that explore the intersection of Earth, Gender and Religion in African literary texts. It examines cultural, religious, theological and philosophical traditions, and their construction of perspectives and attitudes about Earth-keeping and gender. This publication is critical given the current global environmental crisis and its impact on African and global communities. The book is multidisciplinary in approach (literary, environmental, theological and sociological), exploring the intersection of African creative work, religion and the environment in their construction of Earth and gender. It presents how the gendered interconnectedness of the natural environment, with its broad spirituality and deep identification with the woman, features prominently in the myths, folklores, legends, rituals, sacred songs and incantations that are explored in this collection. Both male and female writers in the collection laud and accept woman's enduring motif as worker, symbol and guardian of the environment. This interconnectedness mirrors the importance of the environment for the survival of both human and non-human components of Mother Earth. The ideology of women's agency is emphasised and reinforced by ecofeminist theologians; namely those viewing African women as active agents working closely with the environment and not as subordinates. In the context of the environmental crisis the nurturing role of women should be bolstered and the rich African traditions that conserved the environment preserved. The book advocates the re-engagement of women, particularly their knowledge and conservation techniques and how these can become reservoirs of dying traditions. This volume offers recorded traditions in African literary texts, thereby connecting gender, religion and the environment and helpful perspectives in Earth-keeping.

The work presents articles discussing various subjects relating to literary, cultural borders and borderlands as well as their crossings with the Orient and the Occident. A broad, multifaceted scope of the volume draws the attention of readers to the problem of liminal spaces between cultures, genres, codes and languages of literary and artistic communication. The perspective of borderness proposed by orientalists, literary specialists, culture experts provide insights into multi-dimensional and heterogenic subjects and methods of consideration. The authors referring to, inter alia, comparative studies, theory of reception, intertextuality, transculturality of the East and West works touch upon themes such as coexistence, exclusion, crossing or the instability of borders. Also by taking into account identity issues, the interpenetration of various influences between different literatures, poetics and languages, the readers gain a broader context of intercultural dialogue between the Orient and Occident, what allow them to transgress barriers of a purely artistic, literary reception of the book contents. The volume - due to the abundance of proposed topics, its heterogeneous representations and manifold approaches used in analysis, discussion and (re)interpretations - is a debate's record or a result of an academic reflection rather than a comprehensive monograph.