The first comprehensive survey of LGBTQ fiction in contemporary Ireland. Before Ireland decriminalized same-sex sexual activity in 1993, the nation was essentially devoid of an LGBTQ literary tradition, due to the political and cultural dominance of conservative, censorious ideology. Though the situation has drastically changed in some ways since then--the first nation to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote, Ireland is today hailed as a beacon of equal rights--there is still much work to be done to fully claim parity, visibility, and recognition for all LGBTQ artists. Queer Whispers is the first comprehensive survey of Irish LGBTQ fiction, spanning the late 1970s through today. The book foregrounds the cultural contribution of Irish writers whose subversive, dissident voices not only challenged the homophobia and heteronormative values of pre-1993 Ireland but also continue to interrogate the persistent discrimination in today's seemingly more liberal atmosphere. Through analyses of representative novels and short stories, José Carregal addresses a host of social issues--lesbian invisibility, same-sex parenthood, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, among many others--and considers how authors pushed for broader awareness of the oppression of LGBTQ people in contemporary Ireland. The writing explored in Queer Whispers consistently exposes the limitations imposed by cultural and political silence, while simultaneously articulating new forms of recognition and resilience in the face of queer Ireland's continued struggles.
A NEW YORKER "ESSENTIAL READ" A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, VOGUE, AND NPR "Perhaps Hamid's most remarkable work yet ... an extraordinary vision of human possibility." -Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies "Searing, exhilarating ... reimagines Kafka's iconic The Metamorphosis for our racially charged era." Hamilton Cain, Oprah Daily From the New York Times-bestselling author of Exit West, a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change. One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders's skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them.Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders's father and Oona's mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth--an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew. In Mohsin Hamid's "lyrical and urgent" prose (O Magazine), The Last White Man powerfully uplifts our capacity for empathy and the transcendence over bigotry, fear, and anger it can achieve.
American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through late twentieth and early twenty-first century film, the most compelling manifestations of America's troubled history have articulated this content through a uniqueformal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic's founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane or directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick present a powerful critique ofAmerican conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. The book traces this arc from one of visual history's notoriously troubled texts: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915).American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Poe and Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in characters' racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivete that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a methodat odds with - and implicitly critical of - the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. Citing critiques such as those of Tim Dean and others of efforts to politicize literary and cultural studies, this book restores an emphasis on aesthetic andmedium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white-, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across acanon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty. Following the insistence on a lamenting historical look back in the cases of Faulkner, Kubrick, and the Coens, the book ends by linking Crane'sfamous optimism in The Bridge, one rooted in an ecstatic celebrating of the body and an optimism attending "America" as both concept and nation-state, to the contemporary digital turn and the hope for a more inclusive visual culture as well as racial vision.
This fully revised second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature offers a comprehensive introduction to major writers, genres and topics. For this edition several chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect major developments in Canadian literature since 2004. Surveys of fiction, drama and poetry are complemented by chapters on Aboriginal writing, autobiography, literary criticism, writing by women and the emergence of urban writing. Areas of research that have expanded since the first edition include environmental concerns and questions of sexuality which are freshly explored across several different chapters. A substantial chapter on francophone writing is included. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, noted for her experiments in multiple literary genres, are given full consideration, as is the work of authors who have achieved major recognition, such as Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.
In Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita examine literary representations of settler colonial land enclosure and dispossession in the history of New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Sánchez and Pita analyze a range of Chicano/a and Native American novels, films, short stories, and other cultural artifacts from the eighteenth century to the present, showing how Chicano/a works often celebrate an idealized colonial Spanish past as a way to counter stereotypes of Mexican and Indigenous racial and ethnic inferiority. As they demonstrate, these texts often erase the participation of Spanish and Mexican settlers in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Foregrounding the relationship between literature and settler colonialism, they consider how literary representations of land are manipulated and redefined in ways that point to the changing practices of dispossession. In so doing, Sánchez and Pita prompt critics to reconsider the role of settler colonialism in the deep history of the United States and how spatial and discursive violence are always correlated.
Best known for his masterpiece Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace re-invented fiction and non-fiction for a generation with his groundbreaking and original work. Wallace's desire to blend formal innovation and self-reflexivity with the communicative and restorative function of literature resulted in works that appeal as much to a reader's intellect as they do emotion. As such, few writers in recent memory have quite matched his work's intense critical and popular impact. The essays in this Companion, written by top Wallace scholars, offer a historical and cultural context for grasping Wallace's significance, provide rigorous individual readings of each of his major works, whether story collections, non-fiction, or novels, and address the key themes and concerns of these works, including aesthetics, politics, religion and spirituality, race, and post-humanism. This wide-ranging volume is a necessary resource for understanding an author now widely regarded as one of the most influential and important of his time.
A firsthand account of the 2014 Ferguson uprising that challenges how we document and report on political unrest. Jacqui Germain's debut collection, Bittering the Wound, is a first-person retelling of the 2014 Ferguson uprising. Part documentation, part conjuring, this collection works to share the narrative of the event with more complexity, audacity, care, and specificity than public media accounts typically allow. Throughout the book, Germain also grapples with navigating the impacts of sustained protest-related trauma on mental health as it relates to activism and organizing. The book also takes occasional aim at the media that sensationalized these scenes into a spectacle and at the faceless public that witnessed them. Bittering the Wound challenges the way we discuss, write about, and document political unrest. It offers fresh language and perspective on a historic period that reverberated around the world. Germain takes the reader through poems that depict a range of scenes--from mid-protest to post-protest--and personifies St. Louis with a keen and loving eye. Bittering the Wound was selected by Douglas Kearney as the winner of the 2021 CAAP Book Prize.
Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility is designed as an accessible overview of one of the most popular genres at undergraduate Film Studies. The book identifies three distinct but connected concepts through which it is possible to make sense of melodrama; either as a genre, originating in European theatre of the 18th and 19th century, as a specific cinematic style, epitomised by the work of Douglas Sirk or as a sensibility that emerges in the context of specific texts, speaking to and reflecting the desires, concerns and anxieties of audiences. Films discussed include All That Heaven Allows, Safe, Fear Eats the Soul, Black Narcissus, Suddenly Last Summer and Rebel Without a Cause. Each chapter includes overviews of key essays, analyses of significant and widely studied films and includes an annotated reading list.
Film & Ethics considers a range of films and texts of film criticism alongside disparate philosophical discourses of ethics by Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Lacanian psychoanalysts and postmodern theorists.
Film Noir explores the murky world of a genre responsible for many of film's most enduring images. Mark Bould discusses problems of definition and the often ambiguous nature of film noir and looks at modern films that could be called neo-noir. Iconic and enduring, film noir attracted great stars (Bogart, Bacall, Mitchum, Lancaster), many of the best directors of the era (Wilder, Lang, Preminger, Hawks, Siodmak, Welles) and this book is an indispensible guide to this popular genre.
The two Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have long been considered masterpieces, and their influence on subsequent Greek and Western literature has been immense. An international team of experts discusses the poems, their background and composition, and subsequent reception to the present day. Each chapter features contemporary critical insights and closes with a guide to further reading on the topic.
"Twelve year old Bird Gardner lives a quiet and circumspect existence with his loving but broken father, a talented linguist now relegated to shelving books in Harvard’s library. He knows not to ask too many questions, stand out too much, stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to re-locate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as un-patriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old. Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is drawn into a quest to find her. His journey will take him through the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, into an underground resistance network of librarians, into the lives of the many children who have been taken, and finally to New York, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much needed change. Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can turn a blind eye to the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power—and limitations—of art to create change in the world, what being a good parent really means, and how any of us can survive with a heart beating inside."-- Provided by publisher.