"One of the least understood and often maligned aspects of the Tokugawa Shogunate is the Ooku, or 'Great Interior, ' the institution within the shogun's palace, administered by and for the upper-class shogunal women and their attendants who resided there. Long the object of titillation and a favorite subject for off-the-wall fantasy in historical TV and film dramas, the actual daily life, practices, cultural roles, and ultimate missions of these women have remained largely in the dark, except for occasional explosions of scandal. In crystal-clear prose that is a pleasure to read, this new book, however, presents the Ooku in a whole new down-to-earth, practical light. After many years of perusing unexamined Ooku documents generated by these women and their associates, the authors have provided not only an overview of the fifteen generations of Shoguns whose lives were lived in residence with this institution, but how shoguns interacted differently with it. Much like recent research on imperial convents, they find not a huddled herd of oppressed women, but on the contrary, women highly motivated to the preservation of their own particular cultural institution. Most important, they have been able to identify "the culture of secrecy" within the Ooku itself to be an important mechanism for preserving the highest value, 'loyalty, ' that essential value to their overall self-interested mission dedicated to the survival of the Shogunate itself." - Barbara Ruch, Columbia University "The aura of power and prestige of the institution known as the ooku-the complex network of women related to the shogun and their living quarters deep within Edo castle-has been a popular subject of Japanese television dramas and movies. Brushing aside myths and fallacies that have long obscured our understanding, this thoroughly researched book provides an intimate look at the lives of the elite female residents of the shogun's elaborate compound. Drawing information from contemporary diaries and other private memoirs, as well as official records, the book gives detailed descriptions of the physical layout of their living quarters, regulations, customs, and even clothing, enabling us to actually visualize this walled-in world that was off limits for most of Japanese society. It also outlines the complex hierarchy of positions, and by shining a light on specific women, gives readers insight into the various factions within the ooku and the scandals that occasionally occurred. Both positive and negative aspects of life in the "great interior" are represented, and one learns how some of these high-ranking women wielded tremendous social as well as political power, at times influencing the decision-making of the ruling shoguns. In sum, this book is the most accurate overview and characterization of the ooku to date, revealing how it developed and changed during the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. A treasure trove of information, it will be a vital source for scholars and students of Japan studies, as well as women's studies, and for general readers who are interested in learning more about this fascinating women's institution and its significance in Japanese history and culture." - Patricia Fister, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto
Today medievalism is increasingly intelligible as a cultural lingua franca, produced in trans- and international contexts with a view to reaching popular international audiences, some of mass scope. This book offers new perspectives on international relations and how global concerns are made available through contemporary medievalist texts. It questions how research in medievalism may help us rethink the terms of internationalism and globalism within popular cultures, ideologies, and political formations. It investigates how the diverse media of medievalism (print; film and television; arts and crafts; fashion; digital media; clubs and fandom) affect its cultural meaning and circulation, and its social function, and engage questions of desire, gender and identity construction. As a whole, International Medievalism and Popular Culture differs from those studies which have concentrated on imaginative appropriations of the middle ages for domestic cultural contexts. It investigates rather how contemporary cultures engage with medievalism to map and model ideas of the international, the trans-national, the cosmopolitan and the global. This book includes examples from Europe, Britain, North America, Australia and the Arab world. It discusses the formation and the impact of popular medievalism in the globalised worlds of Braveheart, Disney and Harry Potter, but it also explores how the contemporary medieval imaginary generates international cultural perspectives, for example in considering Middle Eastern reception of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, the Byzantinism of Julia Kristeva, and Hedley Bull's postnationalist 'new medievalism'. International Medievalism in Popular Culture is an important contribution to medieval studies, cultural studies, and historical studies. It will be of value to undergraduate, postgraduate and academic readers, as well as to all interested in popular culture or medievalism.
Although Juan Domingo Perón's central role in Argentine history and the need for an unbiased assessment of his impact on his nation's cinema are beyond dispute, the existing scholarship on the subject is limited. In recent decades Argentina has witnessed a revival of serious film study, some of which has focused on the nation's classical movies and, in one case, on Peronism. None of this work has been translated into English, however.This is the first English-language book that offers an extensive assessment of Argentine cinema during first Peronism. It is also the first study in any language that concentrates systematically on the evolution of social attitudes reflected in Argentine movies throughout those years and that assesses the period's impact on subsequent filmmaking activity. By analyzing popular Argentine movies from this time through the prism of myth-second-order communication systems that present historically developed customs and attitudes as natural-the book traces the filmic construction of gender, criminality, race, the family, sports, and the military. It identifies in movies the development and evolution of mindsets and attitudes that may be construed as "Peronist." By framing its consideration of films from the Perón years in the context of earlier and later ones, it demonstrates that this period accelerates-and sometimes registers backward-looking responses to-earlier progressive mythic shifts, and it traces the development in the 1950s of a critical mindset that comes to fruition in the "new cinema" of the 1960s. Picturing Argentina: Myths, Movies, and the Peronist Vision is an important book for Latin American studies, film studies, and history collections.
Increased global interest in the Arctic poses challenges to contemporary international relations and many questions surround exactly why and how Arctic countries are asserting their influence and claims over their northern reaches and why and how non-Arctic states are turning their attention to the region. Despite the inescapable reality in the growth of interest in the Arctic, relatively little analysis on the international relations aspects of such interest has been done. Traditionally, international relations studies are focused on particular aspects of Arctic relations, but to date there has been no comprehensive effort to explain the region as a whole. Literature on Arctic politics is mostly dedicated to issues such as development, the environment and climate change, or indigenous populations. International relations, traditionally interested in national and international security, has been mostly silent in its engagement with Arctic politics. Essential concepts such as security, sovereignty, institutions, and norms are all key aspects of what is transpiring in the Arctic, and deserve to be explained in order to better comprehend exactly why the Arctic is of such interest. The sheer number of states and organizations currently involved in Arctic international relations make the region a prime case study for scholars, policymakers and interested observers. In this first systematic study of Arctic international relations, Robert W. Murray and Anita Dey Nuttall have brought together a group of the world's leading experts in Arctic affairs to demonstrate the multifaceted and essential nature of circumpolar politics. This book is core reading for political scientists, historians, anthropologists, geographers and any other observer interested in the politics of the Arctic region.
A book like this is long overdue because not many are aware of the numerous intersections between Philip Roth's fiction and world literature. In highlighting these intersections and uneasy passages, this comparative approach offers an important contribution to Philip Roth studies as well as to comparative literary study in general. The fourteen chapters on this book summon Roth's intertextual links to authors ranging from the anonymous writer of the medieval play Everyman, through Thoreau, Hawthorne, Crane, Ellison, Coover, and the New York intellectuals in the United States, to Swift, Chekhov, Svevo, Kafka, Schulz, Gombrowicz, Camus, and Klíma in Europe, and on to Coetzee in South Africa. The book does not deal with all the works in Roth's canon, but it offers a selection of works representing the different stages of Roth's development as a writer. By offering new readings of both well-studied and lesser-studied works, sometimes in unexpected company, the book discloses the critical difference that comparative scholarship can affect. The uneasy passages the book opens will not exhaust the numerous intersections between Roth and the work of other writers. The book's contribution is to place Roth's fiction firmly in a larger transnational context. Far from insular, Roth's work appears as deeply rooted in the American canon while at the same time showing a remarkable openness, a persistent need for contact with his European forebears, and true engagement with contemporary world literature. The transnational perspective of the book makes it important for the rapidly growing field of transatlantic and transnational American studies. The book will be value to collections in American literature and Jewish studies, comparative literature and criticism, and transatlantic and transnational American studies.
Ian McEwan s works have always shown an interest in the question of how fiction operates. This interest does not usually manifest on the formal level. A few of the early stories aside, his fictions are not formally experimental. McEwan tends to opt for those reliable patternings of space, time and narrative progression that enable readers to trust the authorial environment sufficiently to identify with characters and become invested, to some extent, in what happens to them. Readers frequently enter the mind or consciousness of a central character that of Stephen, in The Child in Time (1987), when he realizes he has lost his daughter at the supermarket, or Joe s, in Enduring Love (1997), when he helps saves a boy in a balloon from dying and observe the decisions they make and the actions that follow from them. Nonetheless, McEwan s early stories and first two short novels of the 1970s and early 1980s, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), in particular, contain characters who resist readerly identification. Despite McEwan s commitment, by and large, to naturalistic means of telling a story, his later novels also demonstrate a concern with opacity, as characters often pursue courses of action for reasons that are unclear to them. Equally often, these actions bear some relation to the intrinsic opacity or enigma of one s sexual desires, one s relation to one s mortality, or one s relation to the actions of those human beings who have gone before one, as this book will show. It is this focus on enigma in McEwan s work, whether sexual, mortal, or historical, that lends it to a psychoanalytic reading such as the kind pursued in this book, because for psychoanalysis there is no such thing as full access to one s self or to one s feelings or motivations. Given that one s relation to history is also opaque in the sense that one grasps fully or imagines one grasps fully only those historical events which predate or otherwise excludes one, this study seeks historical reasons for why McEwan sometimes blocks readerly identification with characters in the early fiction. For these characters are also products of their environments, environments which the characters relative opacity and unlikeability seems to offset and exaggerate or present in a manner showcased for one's judgment. And in this way the characters environment is denaturalized, to say the least. This book reveals how all of these works explore, to some extent, the human tendency to act and feel, in particular situations, in profound contradistinction to how one might prefer to think one would. This failure to coincide with one s image of how one would have expected, or preferred, to behave The Innocent s Leonard Marnham is not the cool, experienced lover of his imaginings, any more than Solar s Michael Beard is going to revamp his lifestyle or career produces instances of affective or imaginative excess, troubling images or feelings that can often only be allayed or dealt with by a further failure to coincide with one s desires. In this book, author Eluned Summers-Bremner shows that McEwan s interests in opacity not only become clear in significance and import but that his interests in human failure to coincide with one s views about the past and hopes for the future also appear as what they are: an ongoing concern with how one relates to the complex operation of human history.
This study aims at revising past and current emphasis on central and official British imperial establishments in the metropolis. The focus, rather, incorporates both central and peripheral manning techniques in London and in overseas territories. By using archival and published sources for the military, technical, medical and other professional cadres, plus the manpower enslaved, indentured or employed in executive categories, the study is intended to broaden our understanding of the base and middle strata of the imperial "pyramid". This book is an essential revaluation of British imperial methods that has a place in university and public libraries alongside works on Africa, Southeast Asia, India, Ceylon, the Pacific, and British North America.
"Kora notes: Tijan M. Sallah and the development of Gambian literature, an edited collection of essays principally on the writings of Tijan M. Sallah"--Introduction.
This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (general editor: Victor H. Mair). Yecao (Wild Grass, a.k.a. Weeds), is a 1927 collection of twenty-three prose poems written by Lu Xun (1881-1936), who is China's foremost writer of the twentieth-century. The poems, written between 1924 and 1926, were first published serially in the journal Threads of Talk from 1924 to 1927. This prose poem collection -a literary masterpiece in the eyes of many- features some of Lu Xun's most complex and psychologically dense creative works; Lu Xun himself is purported to have said his "entire philosophy is contained in his Yecao." Despite the significance attributed to this collection within Lu Xun's literary corpus, until now there has not been a single comprehensive English-language study of Yecao. Part of the reason for this considerable gap in the scholarship can be attributed to the fact that fiction has been given primacy in most literary studies of Lu Xun, and prose poetry (sanwen shi) as a genre has generally not been well represented -if at all- in surveys, anthologies, and other collections of twentieth-century Chinese literature. A related cause is Yecao's generic uniqueness, which frustrates efforts to locate it within the canon of modern Chinese literature. Yecao also poses interpretive problems for its readers, because of its unprecedented experimental style (i.e., a lack of commensurability with familiar Chinese literary genres, traditional or modern) and the intricacy and variety of the prose poems, which are notable for their emotional intensity, complex paradoxical structures, symbolic density, sometimes-transparent references to contemporary historical events, and overall generic ambiguity. The combination of the above factors has led to this unique and exceptionally creative collection being frequently ignored or, at best, dealt with in a cursory and selective fashion in much of the English-language Lu Xun scholarship. This study remedies the absence of a comprehensive English-language study of Lu Xun's Yecao and is the perfect companion to the reading and study of Yecao. It is not only a useful reference work and bibliographical source but also an informative contribution to and dialogue with the extant scholarship. Most importantly, this study engages with the Yecao prose poems in a rigorous scholarly fashion while simultaneously allowing each prose poem to influence its reader and determine directions and conclusions made during the interaction of interpretation. This book deftly addresses in detail key aspects of context and content integral to interpreting Yecao. As the first English-language companion to Yecao (providing bibliographical resources, historical context, background on the prose poem genre, an elaboration of Lu Xun's mature aesthetic praxis and philosophical outlook), the book's interpretations of Lu Xun's prose poems will further aspire to bring Yecao and a psychoanalytically informed practice of close reading closer to the fore of Lu Xun studies specifically and Chinese literary studies in general.
This study is a thorough examination of the entire historical scope of the Chinese Buddhist bibliography, including its historical foundations, textual classifications, criteria of authenticity, and collections made by individual catalogers. The need for such a study is urgent, for although references to and even in-depth studies of individual Buddhist catalogs and the data they contain have been written, there has not been until now an investigation into the entire historical scope of Buddhist bibliography in China. Understanding just what those who organized the canon over the centuries have left out, or preserved, is key to recovering a fuller appreciation for the development of Buddhism in East Asia in all its complexity. The study of individual bibliographers positions is equally crucial for the understanding of standards of authenticity and assignment of value to one group of scriptures over others. History of books, libraries, and learning in China would be incomplete without studying the history of Buddhist bibliography. Ultimately, it is necessary to study Buddhist bibliography because it represents the Tripitaka, the largest and most influential collection of sacred scriptures in the world, and because this collection needs to be incorporated into comparative discussions of Scripture and Canon in world history. This is the first study that covers the entire historical scope of Buddhist bibliography in China in any European language, as well as the only study that provides detailed descriptions of all influential catalogs of the Buddhist canon written in the second through the end of the tenth centuries. It is the first attempt, in both European and Asian languages, to provide a comparative analysis between ideas, and these theological and historiographical principles used in creation of an authoritative canon by Christian and Buddhist scholars. The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka is an important book for Asian studies, history of classifications, textual criticism, history of books, and history of libraries. This book would be appropriate for courses in Chinese Buddhism, Chinese history, and Chinese literature and civilizations. It will also be an excellent supplemental textbook for courses in comparative religious studies and comparative religious scripture. Watch Dr. Tanya Storch speak about the book!
Motherhood and maternal relationships abound in much literature by Chicana writers, even when these themes appear to be minor elements of the fiction. In novels in particular, maternal relationships appear quite frequently, attesting to the significance of this theme. In novels by Denise Ch vez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Carla Trujillo, and Melinda Palacio, mother-daughter relationships are central to understanding the protagonists shaping of identity amidst interlocking forces of sexism, racism, homophobia, and classicism within the dominant culture. Ch vez, Castillo, and Cisneros are arguably the most well-known and most-studied of Chicana writers. Ch vez s novels, including The Last of the Menu Girls (1986) and Loving Pedro Infante (2001) have been the subject of multiple studies, as have her poetry and drama. Novels by Castillo, especially So Far From God (1993) and Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), have been exhaustively explored. Cisneros s status as a major American writer was sealed by the enormous success of The House on Mango Street (1984) and her collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek (1991). Novels by Carla Trujillo (What Night Brings) and Melinda Palacio (Ocotillo Dreams), however, have only recently been studied, and their works undoubtedly have a significant place within the Chicana literary canon. Despite the production of these important works, literary criticism has tended to ignore the prevalence of the mother-daughter relationships in these novels. Writers such as these have been highly influential in drawing attention to the rich Chicana literary landscape that has historically been marginalized within the American literary canon. Their novels offer critical glimpses into the worlds in which Chicanas and other women of color must navigate on a daily basis. Cognizant of their identities as non-white women maneuvering within and outside dominant culture and their own Chicana/o families, Chicana writers create fictional works that resist silence and invisibility. Despite the growing literary scholarship on Chicana writers, few, if any, studies have exhaustively explored themes of motherhood, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships in their novels. When discussions of motherhood and mother-daughter relationships do occur in literary scholarship, they tend to mostly be a backdrop to a larger conversation on themes such as identity, space, and sexuality, for example. Mother-daughter relationships have been ignored in much literary criticism, but this book reveals that maternal relationships are crucial to the study of Chicana literature; more precisely, examining maternal relationships provides insight to Chicana writers rejection of intersecting power structures that otherwise silence Chicanas and women of color. This book advances the field of Chicana literary scholarship through a discussion of Chicana writers efforts to re-write the script of maternity outside of existing discourses that situate Chicana mothers as silent and passive and the subsequent mother-daughter relationship as a source of tension and angst. Chicana writers are actively engaged in the process of re-writing motherhood that resists the image of the static, disempowered Chicana mother; on the other hand, these same writers engage in broad representations of Chicana mother-daughter relationships that are not merely a source of conflict but also a means in which both mothers and daughters may achieve subjectivity. While some of the texts studied do present often conflicted relationships between mothers and their daughters, the novels do not comfortably accept this script as the rule; rather, the writers included in this study are highly invested in re-writing Chicana motherhood as a source of empowerment even as their works present strained maternal relationships. Chicana writers have challenged the pervasiveness of the problematic virgin/whore binary which has been the motif on which Chicana womanhood/motherhood has been defined, and they resist the construction of maternity on such narrow terms. Many of the novels included in this study actively foreground a conscious resistance to the limiting binaries of motherhood symbolized in the virgin/whore split. The writers critically call for a rethinking of motherhood beyond this scope as a means to explore the empowering possibilities of maternal relationships. This book is an important contribution to the fields of Chicana/Latina and American literary scholarship.
Rebecca Brown has been dubbed the great secret of American letters. This Seattle-based lesbian author is especially known for being a writers writer, although her award-winning and widely translated book The Gifts of the Body is popular with an international reading audience. Brown s powerful, original, and extremely diverse oeuvre contains collections of essays and short stories, a modern bestiary, a fictionalized autobiography, a memoir in the guise of a medical dictionary, a libretto for a dance opera, a play, and various kinds of fantasy. Brown has a uniquely recognizable voice, writing as she does in a stark style that combines the minimalism of her literary ancestor Samuel Beckett with some of the incantatory rhythms of Gertrude Stein and the dark humor of Franz Kafka. Brown has been praised as an important source of inspiration by several contemporary authors such as the acclaimed Scottish writer Ali Smith. Unlike her more illustrious lesbian colleagues Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca Brown has been working in the shadows for the past thirty years to compose a challenging and highly rewarding oeuvre. Her writings form a fascinating countervoice to the current trend of homonormalization. Brown s unapologetic representations of violent or imbalanced same-sex relations and communities, as well as her fictional engagement with a history of homosexual stigmatization (and its continuation into the present), are of great cultural significance. Yet academic investigations of her oeuvre are still largely lacking. Thanks to its analysis of identities and identifications, this book covers the main areas that are of interest when studying Brown s oeuvre: the spheres of the social and the historical. In addition, the book reveals how literary texts like Brown s can resonate, substantiate, and inflect queer theory as well as social and psychoanalytic theories on (gendered or sexual) identifications. This book is the first study to examine critically the entire oeuvre of Rebecca Brown. It approaches Brown s work from the perspective of queer theory and social theory on identities and identifications. This framework is supplemented with critical appropriations of classic psychoanalytic thinking on the related concepts of incorporation, melancholia, and narcissism. A number of critics have recently sought to redefine theories on social identity-construction by shifting the debate from the notion of identity to the more dynamic concept of identification. Such theories benefit from a concerted attention to literary texts that embody identification processes, put them to the test, and make them tangible. Brown s closely considered writings offer an unusually rewarding case study in this respect, and require attention to both the spheres of the social and the historical. The book explores the processes of identity formation in Brown s work in two social contexts: that of biological and queer kinship. It examines Brown s demythologization of the nuclear family and argues that in the context of queer kinship, too, Brown s presentations take the form of a critical examination (tackling taboo subjects such as identity-formation in positions of extreme dependency). The book also explores the historical identifications taking place in Brown s oeuvre, addressing their autobiographical nature and contesting a reading of Brown s characters as traditional minority subjects in full possession of their life stories. This is an important book for research on women writers, queer studies, and contemporary literature.
Euripides' Medea is one of the most popular Greek tragedies in the contemporary theatre. Numerous modern adaptations see the play as painting a picture of the struggle of the powerless under the powerful, of women against men, of foreigners versus natives. The play has been adapted into colonial and historical contexts to lend its powerful resonances to issues of current import. Black Medea is an anthology of six adaptations of the Euripidean tragedy by contemporary American playwrights that present Medea as a woman of color, combined with interviews, analytical essays and introductions which frame the original and adaptations. Placing six adaptations side by side and interviewing the playwrights in order to gain their insights into their work allows the reader to see how an ancient Greek tragedy has been used by contemporary American artists to frame and understand African American history. Of the six plays present in the volume, three have never before been published and one of the others has been out of print for almost thirty years. Thus the volume makes available to students, scholars and artists a significant body of dramatic work not currently available. Black Medea is an important book for scholars, students, artists and libraries in African American studies, classics, theatre and performance studies, women and gender Studies, adaptation theory and literature. Theatre companies, universities, community theatres, and other producing organizations will also be interested in the volume.
This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (General Editor: Victor H. Mair). Although numerous book-length studies of language and modernity in China and Japan can be found even in English, little has been written in any language on the question of linguistic modernity in Korea. Infected Korean Language, Purity Versus Hybridity by noted journalist and writer Koh Jongsok is a collection of critical essays about Korean language and writing situated at the nexus of modern Korean history, politics, linguistics, and literature. In addition to his journalistic and writing experience, Koh also happens to have a keen interest in language and linguistics, and he has received postgraduate training at the highest level in these subjects at the Sorbonne. This book bears witness to the trials and tribulations-historical, technical and epistemological-by which the Korean language achieved "linguistic modernity" under trying colonial and neo-colonial circumstances. In particular, Koh tackles questions of language ideology and language policy, modern terminology formation, and inscriptional practices (especially the highly politicized questions of vernacular script versus Chinese characters, and of orthography) in an informed and sensitive way. The value of Koh's essays lies in the fact that so little has been written in a critical and politically progressive vein-whether scholarly or otherwise-about the processes whereby traditional Korean inscriptional and linguistic practices became "modern". Indeed, the one group of academics from whom one would expect assistance in this regard, the "national language studies" scholars in Korea, have been so blinkered by their nationalist proclivities as to produce little of interest in this regard. Koh, by contrast, is one of precious few concerned and engaged public intellectuals and creative writers writing on this topic in an easily understandable way. Little or nothing is available in English about modern Korean language ideologies and linguistic politics. This book analyzes the linguistic legacies of the traditional Sinographic Cosmopolis and modern Japanese colonialism and shows how these have been further complicated by the continued and ever-more hegemonic presence of English in post-Liberation Korean linguistic life. It exposes and critiques the ways in which the Korean situation is rendered even more complex by the fact that all these issues have been debated in Korea in an intellectual environment dominated by deeply conservative and racialized notions of "purity", minjok (ethno-nation) and kugo or "national language" (itself an ideological formation owing in large part to Korea's experience with Japan). Koh sheds light on topics like: linguistic modernity and the problem of dictionaries and terminology; Korean language purism and the quest for "pure Korean" on the part of Korean linguistic nationalists; the beginnings of literary Korean in translation and the question of "translationese" in Korean literature; the question of the boundaries of "Korean literature" (if an eighteenth-century Korean intellectual writes a work of fiction in Classical Chinese, is it "Korean literature"?); the vexed issue of the "genetic affiliation" of Korean and the problems with searches for linguistic "bloodlines"; the frequent conflation of language and writing (i.e., of Korean and han'gul) in Korea; the English-as-Official-Language debate in South Korea; the relationship between han'gul and Chinese characters; etc. This book will be of value to those with an interest in language and history in East Asian in general, as well twentieth-century Korean language, literature, politics and history, in particular. The book will be an unprecedented and invaluable resource for students of modern Korean language and literature.
English has long emerged as the lingua franca of globalization but has been somehow estranged in the hands or mouths of aliens, from Joseph Conrad to Chang-rae Lee. Haltingly, their alien characters come to speak in the Anglo-American tongue, yet what emerges is skewed by accents, syntax, body language, and nonstandard contextual references-an uncanny, off-kilter language best described as Alienglish.Either an alien's English that estranges or an alienating English because it sounds so natural, it issues forth from an involuntarily forked tongue and split psyche, operating on two registers, one clear and comprehensible, the other occluded and unfamiliar. Alienglish hence diagnoses the literal split in language or the alien's English; it further suggests the metaphorical splits either of aliens in an English-speaking world or of the English language dubbing and animating an alien world. While such alien performances are largely ventriloquized by native writers in the name of aliens, most blatant of which are Western Orientalism and ethnic self-Orientalism, there were and still are exceptional nonnative writers in Anglo-American tongues, as a direct consequence of Eastern diasporas to the nineteenth-century British Empire and then to the twentieth-century U.S. Empire. These writers include Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Jerzy Kosinski, Kazuo Ishiguro, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Ha Jin, who all seem to share a predicament: the strange English tongue they belabor to host in an effort to feel at home in the Anglo-American host culture as well as in their own bodies deemed foreign bodies. Wherever one hails from, an alien with a tongue graft is doomed to be either a tragic outcast or a pathetic clown, caught between two irreconcilable languages and cultures, searching for an identity in English yet haunted by a phantom tongue pain. The book's methodology fuses the scholarly with the poetic, a montage that springs from the very nature of diaspora, which is as much about rational decisions of relocation as, put simply, feelings. The heart of diaspora, breaking like a cracked voice, is resealed by the head, making both stronger-until another thin line opens up. Only through this double helix of head and heart, thinking and feeling, can one hope to map the DNA of diaspora. Such an unorthodox mélange balances the tongue as a cultural expression from the body and the tongue as a visceral reaction of the body. Any potential crack amid the superstructure of global English and its underside of alien tongues promises discovery of a new world, which has always been there. Alienglish hence arrays itself on a spectrum from the English's Alien to the Alien's English, from white representations of the Other to aliens' self-representations. The usual Orientalist suspects of Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and Gilbert and Sullivan swell to capture affectless aliens from sci-fi, Stieg Larsson, and Lian Hearn. The book then turns to images of Shanghai and Macau, Asian Canadian Joy Kogawa and Evelyn Lau, and the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho. It concludes with an examination of the new China hands (Ha Jin, et al.) and the global media's search for the sublime. The title of this book Alienglish appropriately conveys the uniqueness of this book, which will be a useful contribution to Asian and Asian American studies, comparative literature, diaspora studies, film studies, popular culture, and world literature.
Many cultures, including Greeks, Romans, French, and British, have taken great pride in legends that recount the foundation of their society. This book demonstrates the contexts in which a medieval British matriarchal legend, the Albina narrative, was paired over time with a patriarchal narrative, which was already widely disseminated, leading to the attribution of British origins to the warrior Brutus. By the close of the Middle Ages, the Albina tale had appeared in multiple versions in French, Latin, English, Welsh, and Dutch. This study investigates the classical roots of the narrative and the ways it was manipulated in the Middle Ages to function as a national foundation legend. Of especial interest are the dynamic qualities of the text: how it was adapted over the span of two centuries to meet the changing needs of medieval writers and audiences. The currency in the Middle Ages of the Albina narrative is attested to by its inclusion in nearly all the extant manuscripts of the Middle English Prose Brut, many of the French and Latin Bruts, and in a variety of other chronicles and romances. In total, there are over 230 manuscripts surviving today that contain versions of the Albina tale. Despite this, however, relatively little modern scholarship has focused on this widely disseminated and adapted legend. This book provides the first-ever overview of the entire Albina tradition, from its roots to its eventual demise as a popularly accepted narrative. The Classical basis of the narrative in the Hypermnestra story and the ways it was manipulated in the medieval era to function as a national foundation legend are considered. Folkloric, biblical, and legal influences on the development of the tradition are addressed. The tale is viewed through a variety of lenses to suggest ways it may have functioned or was put to use in the Middle Ages. The study concludes with an overview of the narrative's demise in the Renaissance. This is a useful reference source for medievalists and other scholars interested in chronicle studies, literature, folklore, foundation narratives, manuscript studies, and historiography. It will also be useful to art historians who wish to study the various depictions of the Albina narrative in illuminated texts. The tale's emphasis on matriarchy and its subversion of the accepted societal norm will attract the interest of scholars in feminist studies. As the first analysis of the Albina tradition as a whole, it will be a valuable cornerstone for later studies.
Virginia Woolf has for many years been seen as a key participant in British literary modernism. Following a period of relative critical neglect following her tragic death in 1941, her body of work has earned her recognition as a groundbreaking feminist thinker, a perceptive literary critic, a formidably creative diarist and correspondent, and as one of the twentieth century s leading essayists. Most notably, her experimental fiction, from her first novel The Voyage Out to the posthumously published Between the Acts, has grown in both popularity and critical renown. All of her work remains in print, and novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob s Room are regularly read and discussed both inside and outside the academy. Few modernist writers indeed, few writers of any period have had such a pronounced and lasting impact on literary culture. There has been, and continues to be, an enormous amount of critical and scholarly work done on almost all aspects of Woolf s writing and life. Monographs, journal articles, and collections of essays dedicated to Woolf s writing appear every year alongside scholarly and popular biographies, and there is an annual international conference dedicated solely to her work. Yet amidst this veritable inundation of exegetical energy, this tremendous and ever-growing body of scholarly work on Woolf, there is one curious omission. While Woolf was both in theory and practice fascinated by questions of character and characterization, scholarship has not generally been directed towards this field. This may be due to both general theoretical discomfort with the critical category of character, and to a sense that Woolf s work in particular may not respond well to such interpretations. However, Woolf was very much an experimenter in character, and readings that minimize or ignore this interest miss an important facet of her work. This book offers the first full-length reading of Virginia Woolf s career-long experimentation in character. It examines her early journalism, from her short reviews of contemporary literature to more substantial essays on Gissing and Dostoyevsky, for indications of her engagement with questions of characterization, and links this interest to her later fictional writings. In The Voyage Out she establishes a continuum of levels of characterization, a key element of which is the Theophrastan type, an alternative form of characterization that corresponds to a way of knowing real people, while in Jacob s Room she seeks to represent an elusive essence that may exist outside of the structuring forms of social life, and which is accessible through speculative identification. Mrs Dalloway explores the shaping of character through social pressure, and To the Lighthouse proposes a simplified version of character as an ethically acceptable way of relating to other people. A similar notion is picked up in The Waves, in which a limited character, or form of caricature, is proposed as a possible solution to the problems of characterization. In Between the Acts, many of these themes reappear as Woolf simultaneously situates her characters more firmly than ever in a comprehensible physical and social context, and explores areas where language and rationality fail. Virginia Woolf: Experiments in Character is an important book for Woolf studies in particular, modernism studies more generally, and literature collections.
Since coming to power in 2007, the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN) has proclaimed itself the government of the poor and the government of peace and reconciliation. Accordingly, the regime has endeavoured to control and manipulate the symbols, social images, important spaces, and situations of popular struggles for social justice in the country. Under the watch of Daniel Ortega s administration, Nicaragua has become a country where an extraordinary effort is put into social spectacles, propaganda, and theatricality to create the impression of social and economic transformation. While the current regime orchestrates impressive social performances in support of its power, there are other social spectacles marking Nicaragua s urban landscape that tell a different story. These mine the gap between experiences and promises in today s Nicaragua. The exhibit of suffering bodies in public national spaces as political weapons by pesticide victims, as well as a transvestite circus spectacle in Managua redefine spaces and states of invisibility and visibility by articulating social positions through performance. The bodies of these Nicaraguans refusing to be invisible show Nicaragua s ongoing social drama of a predominant social power relation of inclusion and exclusion within a narrative intersected by political power, marginality and theatricality. As spectacularized bodies, they become avenues for showing processes of structural violence. Although there has been some excellent academic research focusing on performance or/and theatre in Nicaragua, such scholarship seldom attends to the very important connections between daily staged public social acts and local, national/global politics that deal directly and indirectly with marginalized social/cultural landscapes in this country. This book fills the gap by examining the connections between Nicaragua s marginalized landscapes and bodies, between social/political visibility and invisibility, and the relationship between social abandonment and social encompassment in the nation. Three sites form the core of this study: the current government s commoditized performances of compassion for the poor and traditionally excluded components of Nicaraguan society; fringe circuses and their displays of sexual marginality in undesirable urban areas; and, exhibits of suffering bodies in public national spaces as political weapons (aimed at the government and multinationals) by former banana plantation workers. One of the main contributions of Performance, Theatre, and Society in Contemporary Nicaragua is in its collective gathering of insights in areas of performance studies and ethnography that highlight and invoke local epistemes to critique Western ideologies and paradigms. With a view to furthering a critical ethnographic/performative epistemology, the book explores the methodological potentialities of research and presentation in Nicaragua. Through a methodology that combines ethnography and performance studies, called here presentational ethnography, the book brings together theoretical and interpretive insights about the links among neoliberal politics, nostalgia of the revolution and public spectacles that challenge prescribed notions of gender, sexuality and marginality in Nicaragua. Performance, Theatre, and Society in Contemporary Nicaragua is an important book for performance studies, social cultural anthropology, theatre studies and Latin American studies.
This book by renowned anthropologist Harald Haarmann illuminates the acquisition of knowledge, and the meanings underlying forms of knowledge, in a broad temporal scope, ranging from the Neolithic through the modern era. Spiritual knowledge is at the heart of this work, which views myth and religion encoded in Neolithic female figurines and revived in the contemporary primitive artwork of artists such as Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore. Within such a framework, this study employs the knowledge and insights of the relatively new, and very important, interdisciplinary field of archaeomythology, which ties together information from archaeology, DNA studies, mythology, anthropology, classical studies, other ancient language studies, and linguistics. This study does so with a wealth of information in these fields, offering meaningful resolutions to many questions regarding antiquity, and shedding light upon several previously misunderstood phenomena, from the true function of Stonehenge (that its purpose was not astronomical), to the fact that there could not have been a mass movement of agriculturalists from Anatolia to Europe (this is a currently hotly contested issue), to important Eurasian religious beliefs and mythological motifs (with an excellent discussion of shamanism), to systems of writing (with a wonderful discourse upon ancient writing systems), religious expression, and mythology of the exceptionally significant cultures of Old Europe (Neolithic southeastern Europe). The book further discourses upon the legacy of this culture in Minoan and then Greek culture, Old European (pre-Indo-European) lexical items (that is, substrate vocabulary) in Greek, and finally the preservation of Neolithic spirituality in Modern Art. With this interdisciplinary approach, the study demonstrates that all of the subjects of this study are interconnected, in a powerful wholeness. Ancient knowledge, Ancient know-how, Ancient reasoning is an unprecedented study that will appeal across many disciplines, including archaeology, mythology, anthropology, classical studies, ancient language studies, and linguistics. The book also includes several images, maps, and tables that will prove helpful to the reader.
From the time Singapore gained self-government, both girls and boys have been given equal opportunities in education. This access to education has resulted in increased female literacy and improved social and economic status for women. However, in spite of this improvement, women s gender ideologies remain conservative and patriarchal. The school is an ideological apparatus of the state and this study examines how the education system has been used to influence the construction of femininity in school, thus maintaining the state s hegemony and preservation of a patriarchal framework in Singapore. It seeks to explore two questions: how the concept of femininity is constructed in the school curriculum and whether education for girls has empowered women or if it actually has entrapped them in subordination and maintenance of the patriarchal structure of society. In doing so, the author examines the gender ideology of the ruling elite through an analysis of its discourse on women and education. This will provide an understanding of the motivations behind policies such as equal educational opportunities for girls, and will highlight the primacy of pragmatic considerations of national economic advancement. At the same time, issues of subject choice and sex-differentiated curriculum as well as the embedding of gender ideology in curricular materials and school disciplinary codes are also examined in the light of how the concept of femininity is constructed in the school curriculum. A number of studies have focused on Singapore women s lives and careers, including their struggle to maintain coherence in their roles as career women on the one hand, and wives, and mothers on the other. What has not been examined is the school s role in the girls construction of femininity. The school, as the ideological apparatus of the state plays an important role in socializing girls to the norms, beliefs and value systems of the Singapore society. It is important to examine the state s gender ideologies and how such ideologies are transmitted via the education system. Gender messages are embedded in the formal and informal school curricula and these play an important part in children s construction of their gender identities. It has been assumed that because girls and boys are given equal opportunities in education, there are no important gender issues in the sphere of education. This book questions such an assumption and problematizes the role of education as a liberating force for women to investigate if education has indeed liberated women or entrapped them in subordination in a patriarchal society. This is the first comprehensive study of the impact of girls education on their construction of their gender identity. The author shows that women play an important but subordinate role in Singapore, be it in the economic, political or social sphere, and the government s support for equal opportunities for girls is based on pragmatic economic considerations and not on adherence to any dogma or theory. This gender ideology that is reflected in the education policies and curricula for schoolgirls emphasized patriarchal values and upheld traditional feminine virtues such as gentleness, docility and submissiveness. At the same time education and curricular policies encouraged girls to study the hard sciences, like the boys. All these have resulted in the construction of a dual role for women in both the economic and domestic spheres. The study also shows that for many years, education for girls had entrapped them in constructing a gender identity that upheld a patriarchal social structure. However, since the turn of the century, this construct has unraveled as the provision of modern education, especially in science and technology and the opportunities for employment have enabled women to become independent in many senses of the word, and this has brought about changes in society s gender ideology. The Construction of Femininity in a Postcolonial State: Girls Education in Singapore is an important book for any collection on gender and education. Educationists and the general public would find this study an enlightening read because it raises awareness about the importance of the role of education in the construction of gender identities.
In this book, renowned Korean studies scholar Peter H. Lee casts light on important works previously undervalued or suppressed in Korean literary history. He illuminates oral-derived texts as Koryo love songs, p'ansori, and shamanist narrative songs which were composed in the mind, retained in the memory, sung to audiences, and heard but not read, as well as other texts which were written in literary Chinese, the language of the learned ruling class, a challenge even to the reader who has been raised on the Confucian and literary canons of China and Korea. To understand fully the nature of these works, one needs to understand the distinction between what were considered the primary and secondary genres in the traditional canon, the relations between literature written in literary Chinese and that penned in the vernacular, and the generic hierarchy in the official and unofficial canons. The major texts the Koreans studied after the formation of the Korean states were those of the Confucian canon (first five, then eleven, and finally thirteen texts). These texts formed the basic curriculum of education for almost nine hundred years. * The literati who constituted the dominant social class in Korea wrote almost entirely in literary Chinese, the father language, which dominated the world of letters. This class, which controlled the canon of traditional Korean literature and critical discourse, adopted as official the genres of Chinese poetry and prose. Among the works in literary Chinese examined, this book explores the foundation myths of Koguryo and Choson, which center on the hero's deeds retold and sung to music composed for the purpose. Works in the vernacular discussed in this book include Kory? love songs, which reveal oral traditional features but have survived only in written form. Lyrics were often censored by officials as dealing with "love between the sexes." They intensely affect today's listener and reader, who try to reimagine the role of a general audience assumed to have the same background and concomitant expectations as the composers. The book also illuminates the works of the shaman, who occupied the lowest social strata. Shamans had to endure suffering imposed by authority, but their faith and rites brought solace to many, powerful and powerless, rich and poor. Some extant written texts are riddled with learned diction-Sino-Korean words and technical vocabulary from Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian traditions. This study explores how the unlettered shamans of the past managed to understand these texts and commit them to memory, especially given the fact that shamans depended more on aural intake and oral output than on the eye. The Story of Traditional Korean Literature opens the window to the fusion--as opposed to the conflict--of horizons, a dialogue between past and present, which will enable readers to understand and appreciate the text's unity of meaning. The aim of crosscultural comparison and contrast is to discover differences at points of maximum resemblance. Lee's comparative style is metacritical, transnational, and intertextual, involving also social and cultural issues, and also paying careful attention to be non-Eurocentric, nonpatriarchal, and nonelitist. This book will provide critical insights into both the works and the challenges of the topics discussed. It will be an important resource for those in Asian studies and literary criticism.
Lord Ferdinando Stanley was the fifth earl of Derby, a leading claimant to the throne. Considered a man who had everything, he was also the patron of the company of players which was fortunate enough to include William Shakespeare. One April Fool's Day, 1594, he was reportedly approached by a witch (one of the famous legion of "Lancashire witches") and they engaged in brief conversation while strolling outside his largest palace, Lathom Hall. Four days later, he fell violently ill. For twelve days he lingered, while four of the best doctors in the country, including the famous Dr. John Case of Oxford, labored in vain to save him.Who killed Lord Stanley and why? Historians started debating that question almost as soon as he died, and outraged gossip was to be heard everywhere in England. This second edition studies the death of Lord Derby within the immediate contexts of Elizabethan power politics, succession mania, passionate religious controversy, the records of prominent families in the North, and the cult of personality just then beginning to become a major factor in the nation's social history. The book's scope also includes subcultural contexts such as Elizabethan poetry (Lord Derby was a pastoral love poet, some of whose work survives), witchcraft, medicine, spy networks, and both approved and disapproved methods of political assassination (with poison being the most frowned upon because of its disreputable "Italianate" connotations).
Conversant in critical and creative modes of thought, this book examines the uses of translation in Asian and Anglophone literatures to bridge discontinuous subjectivities in Eurasian transnational identities and translingual hybridizations of literary Modernism. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations focuses on the roles of mysticism and language in Dict e's poetic deconstruction of empire, engaging metaphysical issues salient in the history of translation studies to describe how Theresa Cha and four other authors Sui Sin Far, Chuang Hua, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Virginia Woolf used figurative and actual translations to bridge discontinuous subjectivities. The author Karen Lee s explorations of linguistic politics and poetics in this eclectic group of writers concentrates on the play of innovative language deployed to negotiate divided or multiple consciousness. Over the past decade, emerging scholarship on transnationalism and writers of Asian heritage has focused primarily on diasporic Asian literary production on American soil. For instance, Rachel Lee s seminal publication, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999), examines how Asian American feminist literary criticism is shaped by global-local influences in the United States. Additionally, Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (2006), edited by Shirley Lim, et al., explores the transnational aspects of Asian literature in America, analyzing a discursive globalized imaginary as American writers Asian of heritage move within and across national boundaries. Following Lim s anthology, Lan Dong s Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine (2010) concerns the representations of women transposed from Asian oral traditions of women warriors to the United States. However, less scholarship on the Anglophone literatures of Asia and the Americas has focused on Asian writers within broader comparative frameworks of global perspectives outside Asian American literature and in comparison to Asian British literature, or aside from the parameters of specific Asia-to-America tropes such as the aforementioned woman warrior, as in Sheng-mei Ma s Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998), or Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa s Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001). Uniquely situated among these discussions, Lee s book extends current lines of inquiry by including the oeuvres of diasporic Asian writers in Asia, America, and abroad, presenting their works within the contexts of transnationalism via the dual lenses of translation and translingual migration. As new scholarship, this book foregrounds literary transnationalism and translingual migrations in a context of East to West as a study of representative Anglophone literatures in the Asian diaspora. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations is highly relevant to university teaching audiences in postcolonial literature, Asian American studies, Anglophone writers of the Asian diaspora, cultural feminism, Eurasian studies, and translation studies.
Edgar Allan Poe is a Romantic writer whose main aim in writing even in his so-called Gothic tales has been the deciphering of the soul and a fascination with the workings of the unconscious. As a post-enlightenment believer in the language of dreams, he experimented new ways of discovering the self. His practice shared a lot with and provided a rich soil for what was to be called analytical psychology. Edgar Allan Poe: An Archetypal Reading, while ostensibly attempting to read Poe s writings by way of archetypal models, takes the confident critical stance of resisting being limited by a singular--Jungian -approach, even though this would have been a convenient, even expected, route to take. The psychological or Freudian approach, which provides one major framework of interpreting symbols, has already been applied to Poe, with its own contribution and limitation, but in this book Poe is studied from an archetypal perspective. This approach is also used to deal with symbols in a framework, but the structure is more extensive because it attempts to address symbols not as symptoms in pathological cases but as normal phenomena in life. In a critical climate that sees scholarship mired in the feet-dragging obsession with arriving at originality and theoretical novelty, the present book s ability to retain its critical focus is evidence of a disciplined scholarly mind. Zarei carefully acknowledges the tradition out of which the adopted methodology emerges, and he is also mindful of the complexities and problematics that form a kind of critical baggage. The book navigates this complicated discourse with ease which is a testament of the author s mastery over the subject, as well as the primary material. The introductory chapter is convincing in its description of the archetypal approach, presenting its relationship to other, similar critical modes and therefore addressing the criticism that such an approach is old-fashioned. The organization of the book by aspects of the mythic tradition -heroism, journey and return -reinforces its purpose; these thematic elements apply to virtually the whole history of narrative writing. Therefore, the analysis locates Poe in a mythic-epic tradition rather than merely pointing out archetypal elements to a less clear purpose. Cultural and political concerns are incorporated persuasively into the argument. The choice of primary material covers the range of Poe s writings and provides an accurate representation of his body of work as they are mapped onto the archetypal models proposed in this book, thereby validating the models as more than mere conceptual ideas. The book makes a substantial contribution because it will be helpful to anyone interested in post-Jungian readings of Poe. Given that a substantial cohort of Poe critics employ psychoanalytic techniques, largely Freudian, these chapters should be a useful edition to the accumulated wisdom about an American Romantic author. Edgar Allan Poe: An Archetypal Reading is a useful addition to collections in American literature.
Research examining how schoolteachers have been represented in the news is scarce. This is noteworthy, given the recognition that the news media has an influential agenda-setting function, plays a pivotal role in shaping public opinion, and can influence educational policy. Indeed, there is a view amongst some authorities that education policy and news media coverage are irrevocably interconnected. Specifically in relation to newspapers, research indicates that their coverage can be particularly influential in informing and influencing public debate and policy about a variety of educational issues. Research has also been conducted on the reactions of teachers, reporting that they perceive news media coverage as important in shaping public opinion and education policy, as well as affecting their relationships with families, friends, and the community. Teachers in various countries have also expressed frustration at what they have perceived as a negative focus in coverage. Furthermore, news media coverage has been seen to play a role to the decline in the status of teaching that has been documented by researchers from many developed countries over the past three decades. It has been claimed that contemporary news media coverage has led to greater scrutiny and criticism of the teaching profession than ever before, with educators increasingly having to explain and justify their work. In addition to the widespread concern about the decline in the status of teaching, many countries are experiencing ongoing teacher recruitment and retention problems. Despite this, very few studies have considered how schoolteachers and teaching as a profession are depicted in the news media. Particularly scarce are investigations with a historical dimension. This book helps fill the gap by examining the reporting in The West Australian newspaper, one of the oldest newspapers in Australia and a daily publication since 1885. It is offered as a contribution towards rectifying the deficit in the corpus of work on how newspapers have depicted teachers and points the way towards one of a number of avenues of research that other scholars in the field could take for various contexts (including different countries) and time periods. The specific aim of the study is to provide a historical analysis of The West Australian newspaper s representation of teachers over two decades. To that end, it examines the portrayal of teachers in its reporting of five major educational developments in the state of Western Australia that were the subject of sustained coverage at various times between 1987 and 2007: unit curriculum (1987 1989), industrial dispute (1995), standardised testing (1997 2001), teacher shortage (1997 2007), and outcomes-based education (2005 2007). Although the study focused on The West Australian newspaper, the topics chosen reflect the international trends and universal issues in education. Each of the topics in the study is located within the broader context of related developments internationally, and especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Three key representations of teachers are identified: negative representations, sympathetic representations, and positive representations. The negative representations refer to coverage which is overtly critical of teachers such as reporting which condemns teachers for taking industrial action, the sympathetic representations relate to reporting which typically presents teachers as stressed, overburdened and powerless; and the positive representations show teachers as valued by the community and devoted to their students and work. The central argument of the study is that The West Australian s coverage was dominated by both negative and sympathetic representations of schoolteachers, while positive representations were relatively rare. Overall, the coverage presented a less flattering image of teachers than that which emerges from the educational research literature, yet it provided a more balanced presentation of teachers than the extremes of hero and villain which tend to dominate popular culture. Its portrayal of teachers was generally consistent with that of other news media, with a movement towards a more sympathetic treatment in recent reporting reflecting a trend also identified in contemporary British newspaper coverage. Although the sympathetic coverage did recognize the challenges faced by teachers, it consistently presented teaching as a profession in a negative light. Across the coverage, there was almost a total absence of voices defending teaching or presenting it as an attractive career option. In addition, comments of any type from individual teachers were rare. Overall, the book highlights the need for key media spokespeople in education politicians, union representatives, bureaucrats and academics to consider carefully the messages they want to send regarding teachers and teaching. It also points to implications for journalism education and journalism practice. This book should be read by those working in the fields of educational policy, journalism education, media studies, and history of education internationally, particularly those working in these fields in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
Contemporary American dance scholars agree that the first venue for critically informed, aware, and diverse reflections on dance was Impulse. While Impulse was recognized as the platform for dance scholarship during the years of its publication, following its cessation in 1970, only a handful of libraries and collections retained a full complement of its issues. Over time and out of view Impulse began to fade from memory, and many upcoming dance scholars were unaware of its rich history and seminal contributions to the field. Fortunately, as Impulse collected dust on shelves, technologies evolved that offered hope for the preservation of print and media collections. In 2008 a project was initiated to preserve Impulse as a digital collection and bring together a cohort of dance scholars to analyze each issue from today's point of view. Their collected works are presented in Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting Impulse, 1950-1970. There is no comparable study or project designed to preserve and facilitate access to original source materials in dance at this time. Perspectives on Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting Impulse, 1950-1970 stands alone as a compendium of critical analyses of the full roster of a publication dedicated to dance. As eminent authors of the time were invited to contribute to issues of Impulse, contemporary dance scholars were invited to contribute to this book that examines Impulse from today's point of view. This volume revisits the journal's breadth of commentary, scope of authorship, and provocative yet engaging discourses. In these regards Perspectives on Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting Impulse, 1950-1970 is unlike any other contemporary volume of dance studies. Perspectives on Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting Impulse, 1950-1970 will be of interest to current and emerging dance scholars, dance historians, cultural theorists, education specialist, arts librarians, and those who seek a model for reclaiming the foundational literature of a discipline.
Each year in the United States alone, over 125,000 children suffer serious burn injuries, and only a relative few are treated at specialized centers. Ratios are even more dismal in other regions of the world. These cases require immediate and complex care from a myriad of disciplines if survival and full functional recovery are to be achieved. This unprecedented book is therefore a vital resource as it describes the most advanced practices in use throughout the world in every type of burn wound category, providing clear descriptions of treatment methods from every discipline's perspective and from a variety of countries. It is the first book ever undertaken that is solely dedicated to providing a comprehensive roadmap to caregivers involved in treating and rehabilitating the child with a serious burn injury, from emergency room to resocialization. It is also the first planned approach to the future of pediatric burn care and education. The contributors to the volume were carefully selected for their expertise for this volume and are considered the top surgeons in the field. The editor, renowned surgeon and professor, Dr. Bradley Phillips, has devoted his career to the care of injured children. As an operating surgeon, active clinician, educator, lecturer and prolific author, Dr. Phillips' expertise is widely respected and recognized in the field. In this text, he has leveraged his Burn-Trauma-ICU background with selected colleagues from around the world in order to produce a work that encompasses the unique and cultural-specific aspects of caring for burned children. Pediatric Burns is an unprecedented edited volume that focuses on the spectrum of childhood burn injury. A collaborative work from authors around the world, this book describes the principles of management from Time Zero through Long-term Rehabilitation. Recognized experts have written individual chapters and the entire work addresses practical issues involved in caring for this unique patient population. This is a limited paperback edition.
"Alison Moore's sparkling collection of essays offers a host of fascinating perspectives on gender in French politics from the European witch-craze through to the current head-scarf controversy." - Colin Jones, Professor of History, Queen Mary University of London "Sexing Political Culture in the History of France gathers together several compelling essays that nuance older studies about how gender and sexual symbols stand in for the nation in its various incarnations from the Early Modern period to the present. By combining a long historical trajectory with detailed analyses of how the state or its opponents have used symbolic meaning to mobilize political action, clarify or criticize hierarchy, or simply make sense of social norms, these essays demonstrate the distinctive power of such symbolism and thus of this area of focus, which traverses intellectual, social, cultural history as well as the history of gender and sexuality. This is a cutting-edge collection that moves coherently from the early modern witch hunt to race in postcolonial France." - Carolyn J. Dean, John Hay Professor of International Studies, Brown University "Sexing Political Culture in the History of France marks a genuinely new departure in European history of sexuality studies. Alison Moore has gathered together contributions which demonstrate the manifold ways in which the language of gendered and sexualized stereotypes, behaviors, and practices has been deployed in the service of patriotic propaganda and the othering energies of nationalism in the French context. Further, she urges a nuanced focus on the fact that scholars too have embraced the tendency to metaphorize national, religious and political situations using sexual and gendered symbols. As such, the book also stands as a meditation on the political and libidinal character of historiography itself. The essays collected together in the volume cover a broad historical span and treat a wide-ranging array of fascinating topics from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts to historically recent debates about French secularism, Islamophobia, and the wearing of the veil. This book is a must-read for all students and scholars of French and European studies, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of ideas." - Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality, University of Birmingham
"Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World is the first book devoted to Sinophone Southeast Asian literature in the English-speaking world. Conceptually innovative and flawlessly written, this book makes an important contribution not only to the emergent and growing field of Sinophone studies, but also to Southeast Asian studies, Chinese studies, comparative literary studies, diaspora studies, and minority and multicultural studies. Anyone interested in questions of identity calibrated through such vectors as language, culture, history, geography, and nationality will find this book to be extremely valuable. This is an impressive accomplishment." - Professor Shu-mei Shih, University of California at Los Angeles "E. K. Tan has done magnificent work in rethinking literary and cultural politics in the context of Sinophone articulations. In Rethinking Chineseness he looks into sources drawn from the Sinophone communities in Southeast Asia, identifies indigenous and diasporic contestations, and teases out the radical elements in the contemporary debate about Chinese identities. Both historically engaged and theoretically provocative, Tan's book is a most important source for anyone interested in Chinese and Sinophone literary and cultural studies." - Professor David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "With his illuminating historical and theoretical mapping of the concepts, from Overseas Chinese to Chinese Diaspora, Chineseness to Sinophone, E.K. Tan has done a brilliant job in this highly challenging, interdisciplinary project by weaving together discourses in various academic fields and providing an integrated cross-referential discussion. His selection of works by Singaporean and Malaysian writers fills in glaring gaps and further contributes to the richness and complexities of the notion of Sinophone literature and culture. It is a definitive basic reference in this field." - Professor Quah Sy Ren, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Sexuality is often perceived as shameful, for the dangers it potentially precipitates rape, incest, exploitation, cruelty, and humiliation often outweigh its pleasures. Essentialist arguments surrounding sexuality have historically cast the subject as taboo, and even within relationships where sex is sanctioned namely heterosexual marital relationships it is often a difficult subject to navigate and negotiate. Over the last thirty years, feminist, postcolonial and queer theorists have interrogated the ways in which sexuality is conceptualized and constructed, specifically with the intention of deconstructing essentialist notions of sexuality and identity formation. Yet, while recent theoretical interventions have re-situated sexuality as a historical and social category allowing us to see how ideas about sexuality are linked to forms of power and other hegemonic categories of identity and subjectivity like class, race, gender and nationality sexuality remains a contentious subject. Debates surrounding the politics and problems of pleasure still proliferate within the academy, and in contemporary popular culture and society the pervasiveness of moral panics concerning the sexualisation or pornographication of Western cultures indicate that sexuality remains an elusive and complex topic, and one that requires continued critical reflection. A review of recent scholarship investigating the cultural representation of sexuality, work that pays specific attention to the imaginary and the expressive, reveals that much critical attention has tended to focus on film, theatre, and the visual arts rather than literature. While this is not surprising given the dominance of visual culture in today s media-saturated societies around the world, literature and written discourse will continue to play a central role in determining how we understand and define our (sexual) selves as long as there are literate populations. This collection seeks to close a gap in current critical scholarship by attending precisely to the nexus between sexuality and literature of the contemporary moment. It contends that reading, not just viewing, informs how we think of ourselves as sexual beings, and that literature and the written realm of the imagination remains an important outlet for the expression and exploration of sexual desire, sexual acts, sexual being, sexual identity and sexual interaction. In critically examining the plural representations of sexuality in contemporary literature, this book has a distinctly global emphasis, containing essays that interrogate sexuality in the work of not only a number of mainstream American and British writers but also less well-known writers from New Zealand and Canada. All of the chapters owe primary intellectual and theoretical debts to three broad and overlapping domains of critical scholarship and practice: feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. As the first critical collection of essays to consider the representation of sexuality across such a wide variety of contemporary writing, Sexuality and Contemporary Literature analytically foregrounds insights into the historical and current arrangements of sexuality that contemporary literature provides, while also inviting the reader to imagine other possibilities for the future that literary texts open up. Sexuality and Contemporary Literature is an important book for literary and cultural studies collections.
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