New Release Children's Books - Literature

This book analyzes and offers fresh insights into the trickster tradition including African American, American Indian, Euro-American, Asian American, and Latino/a stories, Morgan examines the oral roots of each racial/ethnic group to reveal how each group''s history, frustrations, and aspirations have molded the tradition in contemporary literature.

Fascination with the dark and death threats are now accepted features of contemporary fantasy and fantastic fictions for young readers. These go back to the early gothic genre in which child characters were extensively used by authors. The aim of this book is to rediscover the children in their work.

McCoy examines how Greek epic, tragedy, and philosophy offer important insights into the nature of human vulnerability, especially how Greek thought extols the recognition and proper acceptance of vulnerability. Beginning with the literary works of Homer and Sophocles, she also expands her analysis to the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle.

This Handbook offers an authoritative and up-to-date collection of original essays bringing together ground breaking research into the development of contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland.

Disrupting recent fashionable debates on secularism, this book raises the stakes on how we understand the space of the secular, independent of its battle with the religious, as a space of radical democratic politics that refuse to be theologized.

Originally published in 1954, this book is an anthology of 260 Italian letters written between 1459 and 1600 by some of the most prominent figures of the Renaissance, including Michelangelo, Cellini and Machiavelli. Butler divides the letters according to subject matter - news, family matters, reproach, and others - and charts the development of letter writing as a literary form, which flourished in Italy long before anywhere else. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Renaissance or Italian history.

A former poet laureate provides informative introductions and sidebar notes for more than 80 poems by greats including William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, in an effort to spark pleasure in reading and writing poems. 13,000 first printing.

With case study examples across a range of media, this book brings together leading international scholars to explore new directions in adaptation studies.

A detailed study of the self-conscious narrative devices within Euripidean drama and how these are interwoven with issues of thematic importance, social, theological, or political. Torrance argues that Euripides employed a complex system of metapoetic strategies in order to draw the audience''s attention to the novelty of his compositions.

The success of the Caine Prize for African Writing and the growth of online publishing have played key roles in putting the short story in its rightful place within the study and criticism of African literature.

Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapescritically examines the representations, constructions, and imaginings of the relationship between the human and non-human worlds in contemporary African literature and culture. It offers innovative, incisive, and critical perspectives on the importance of sustaining a symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment. The book thus carries African scholarship beyond the mere analysis of themes and style to ethical and activist roles of literature having an impact on readers and the public. It is a scholarship geared towards rectifying ecological imbalance that is prevalent in many parts of the continent that forms the setting, context, and thematic discourse of the works or authors studied in this book. Besides sensitizing the African readership to the need for the restoration of harmony between man and the environment, this book equally aims to further familiarize scholars and students working on African literature and culture with the theoretical concerns of eco-criticism.

This landmark volume brings together a very rich harvest of forty critical essays on Cameroon literature by Cameroon literary scholars. The book is the result of the Second Conference on Cameroon Literature which took place at the University of Buea in 1994. The Buea conference was motivated by a determination to look at Cameroon literature straight into its face and criticize it using literary criteria of the strictest kind. Gone were the times when the criticism was complacent because it was believed that a nascent literature could easily be stifled by application of rather strict cannons of literary criticism. Both writers and critics had a lot to say. Subjects dealt with ranged from general topics on literature, survival and national identity, through specialized articles on prose, poetry, drama, translation, language, folklore, children''s literature, Journalism and politics. It is the hope of the volume editors that the publication of these papers will instigate the kind of actions that were recommended and that the prolific nature of Cameroon literature will equally give rise to a prolific and robust criticism.

The Darkness of the Present includes essays that collectively investigate the roles of anomaly and anachronism as they work to unsettle commonplace notions of the “contemporary” in the field of poetics. In the eleven essays of The Darkness of the Present, poet and critic Steve McCaffery argues that by approaching the past and the present as unified entities, the contemporary is made historical at the same time as the historical is made contemporary. McCaffery’s writings work against the urge to classify works by placing them in standard literary periods or disciplinary partitions. Instead, McCaffery offers a variety of insights into unusual and ingenious affiliations between poetic works that may have previously seemed distinctive. He questions the usual associations of originality and precedence. In the process, he repositions many texts within genealogies separate from the ones to which they are traditionally assigned. The chapters in The Darkness of the Present might seem to present an eclectic façade and can certainly be read independently. They are linked, however, by a common preoccupation reflected in the title of the book: the anomaly and the anachronism and the way their empirical emergence works to unsettle a steady notion of the “contemporary” or “new.”

Academic literature rarely gives an account of the ethical challenges and emotional pitfalls the researcher is confronted with before, during and after being in the field. Giving personal accounts, the authors explore some of the challenges one can face when engaging in local-level research in difficult situations.

Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.

Jackie accepts an opportunity to host a local radio show where she creates a late-night persona, Miss Dreamsville, and launches a reading group thus sending the conservative and racially segregated town into uproar.

Offering a timely snapshot of current theory and research in the field of psychology in foreign language learning, this book is accessible to both specialists and non-specialists. Each chapter focuses on a different psychological construct and provides an overview of current thinking in the area drawing on insights from educational psychology.

Papers from a conference held Septemeber 29-October 1, 2011 in Joensuu, Finland.

Bringing his perennially popular course to the page, Yale University Professor Paul H. Fry offers in this welcome book a guided tour of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. At the core of the book''s discussion is a series of underlying questions: What is literature, how is it produced, how can it be understood, and what is its purpose? Fry engages with the major themes and strands in twentieth-century literary theory, among them the hermeneutic circle, New Criticism, structuralism, linguistics and literature, Freud and fiction, Jacques Lacan''s theories, the postmodern psyche, the political unconscious, New Historicism, the classical feminist tradition, African American criticism, queer theory, and gender performativity. By incorporating philosophical and social perspectives to connect these many trends, the author offers readers a coherent overall context for a deeper and richer reading of literature.

"Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state.

“This amalgam of essay, literary criticism, and memoir blends into a tribute to the world of books.” —Chicago Tribune

Adaptation constitutes the driving force of contemporary culture, with stories adapted across an array of media formats. However, adaptation studies has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis, in particular with compare-and-contrast studies of individual novel and film pairings. This has left almost completely unexamined crucial questions of how adaptations come to be made, what are the industries with the greatest stake in making them, and who the decision-makers are in the adaptation process. The Adaptation Industry re-imagines adaptation not as an abstract process, but as a material industry. It presents the adaptation industry as a cultural economy of six interlocking institutions, stakeholders and decision-makers all engaged in the actual business of adapting texts: authors; agents; publishers; book prize committees; scriptwriters; and screen producers and distributors. Through trading in intellectual property rights to cultural works, these six nodal points in the adaptation network are tightly interlinked, with success for one party potentially auguring for success in other spheres. But marked rivalries between these institutional forces also exist, with competition characterizing every aspect of the adaptation process. This book constructs an overdue sociology of contemporary literary adaptation, never losing sight of the material and institutional dimensions of this powerful process.

An in-depth and comprehensive account of the complex history of Japanese modernism from the mid-19th century ''opening to the West'' until the 21st century globalized world of ''postmodernism.'' Its concept of modernism encompasses not just the aesthetic avant-garde but a wide spectrum of social, political and cultural phenomena.

"Beatrice is so well-known for never making a mistake that she is greeted each morning by fans and reporters, but a near-error on the day of the school talent show could change everything."--Print.

A collection of essays by a team of distinguished international contributors concerned with how Classic - mainly Greek and Latin but also Arabic and Portuguese - texts become present in later cultures; how they are passed on, received and affect over time and space, and how they resonate in the modern.

Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic "distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière''s corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of "literature" is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, "literature" is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature''s still-vital capacity for reinvention.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,00, University of Koblenz-Landau (Anglistik), course: Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures, language: English, abstract: Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the best-known literary postcolonial replies to the writing of Charlotte Bronte and a brilliant deconstruction of what is known as the author''s "worlding" in Jane Eyre. The novel written by Jean Rhys tells the story of Jane Eyre''s protagonist, Edward Rochester. The plot takes place in West Indies where Rochester met his first wife, Bertha Antoinette Mason. Wide Sargasso Sea influences the common reading and understanding of the matrix novel, as it rewrites crucial parts of Jane Eyre. The heroine in Jean Rhys''s Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway, is created out of demonic and bestialic Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. Rhys''s great achievement in her re-writing of the Bronte''s text is her creation of a double to the madwoman from Jane Eyre. The heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea, the beautiful Antoinette Cosway, heiress of the post-emancipation fortune is created out of the demonc and bestialic Bertha Mason. The author transforms the first Mrs Rochester into an individual figure whose madness is caused by imperialistic and patriarchal oppression The vision of Bertha/Antoinette as an insane offspring from a family plagued by madness is no longer plausible to the reader. In this essay I would like to focus the factors which led to the madness of the protagonist. Although Bertha Mason and Jane Eyre seem to be enemies and contradictory characters in the Victorian novel, many critics find several similarities between the two heroines, their life and finally between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Seeing Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway as sisters and doubles is very popular with some critics who dealt with the works of Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys. Nevertheless, I would like to focus in this essay on Gayatri Chakravort

Through analysis of how English writers summarized and abridged history, Wheatley illuminates the connections between an early modern epitome culture and the historical summaries found in the great narrative poems of Edmund Spenser, Abraham Cowley and John Milton. Clearly and elegantly written, this study shows how poets refined an epic convention, the hero''s confrontation with summaries of past and future in order to reflect trends in early modern history writing.

As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory and criticism. Halliwell''s volume offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the defining authors and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes'' Frogs, Plato''s Republic, Aristotle''s Poetics, Gorgias''s Helen, Isocrates'' treatises, Philodemus'' On Poems, and Longinus On the Sublime. The volume''s fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. The book''s organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right (a kind of ''ecstasy'') and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences'' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, Halliwell questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts analysed. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which the Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology of poetic experience - including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge - in the life of their culture.

Jean Arnold explores the role material objects play in the cultural cohesion of the West, arguing that gems symbolized the most closely held beliefs of the Victorians and thus can be considered prisms of culture. Her close readings of works by Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope show jewels turned into symbols of power, personal relationships, and valued ideas that serve to bind the materialist culture together.

This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field reveals the major contribution of puritan women to the intellectual culture of the early modern period. It demonstrates that women''s roles within puritan and broader communities encompassed translating and disseminating key texts, producing an impressive body of original writing.

This book develops a stimulating new way of looking at texts, with case studies from Western and Indian literature.

Raymond Williams was an enormously influential figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life as a novelist, playwright and critic, "the British Sartre," as The Times put it. He was a central inspiration for the early British New Left and a close intellectual supporter of Plaid Cymru. He is widely acknowledged as one of the "founding fathers" of cultural studies, who established "cultural materialism" as a new paradigm for work in both literary and cultural studies. There is a substantial secondary literature on Williams, which treats his life and work in each of these respects. But none of it makes much of his enduring contribution to utopian studies and science fiction studies. This volume brings together a complete collection of Williams''s critical essays on science fiction and futurology, Utopia, and dystopia, in literature, film, television, and politics, and with extracts from his two future novels, The Volunteers (1978) and The Fight for Manod (1979). Both the collection as a whole and the individual readings are accompanied by introductory essays written by Andrew Milner. "With the twenty-first-century reader very much in mind, Andrew Milner''s selection of texts offers a new, `alternative'' Raymond Williams - the critic and occasional author of science fiction, the futurologist, the wary, self-questioning Utopian thinker for whom intellectual pessimism is a lazy response and never the last word." Professor Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading "The future was the ultimate stake in all Raymond Williams''s thinking and writing, as Andrew Milner simply and powerfully shows us now, by assembling a volume of writings on science fiction and utopianism that turns out to be a very substantial, wide-ranging reader in Williams''s work as a whole. The defining importance of `the sense of the future,'' as he called it, the future as the essential discipline of political and moral imagination, is the lesson of this very welcome collection." Professor Francis Mulhern, Middlesex University

The multitudinous nature of African literature has always been an issue but really not a problem, although its oral base has been used by expatriate critics to accuse African literature of thin plots, superficial characterisation, and narrative structures. African literature also, it is observed, is a mixed grill: it is oral; it is written in vernacular or tribal tongues; written in foreign tongues English, French, Portuguese and within the foreign language in which it is written, pidgin and creole further bend the already bent language giving African literature a further taint of linguistic impurity. African literature further suffers from the nature of its "newness" and this created problems for the critic. Because it is new, and because its critics are in simultaneous existence with its writers, we confront the problem of "instant analysis". Issues in African Literature continues the debate and tries to clarify contemporary burning issues in African literature, by focussing on particular areas where the debate has been most concerned or around which it has hovered and been persistent.

"Richard Stern is a literary treasure."---Scott Turow --

In celebration of what would have been Ezra Pound''s 125th birthday comes a new edition of the author''s classic book about the meaning of literature, now with a new introduction. Reissue.

This volume defines versions of the transnational in their historical and cultural specificity. By "locating," the contributors contextualize historical and contemporary understandings of the fluid term "transnational," which vary in relation to the disciplines involved. This kind of historical and geographical "locating" implicitly turns against forms of contemporary transnational euphoria which, inspired by poststructural models of all-encompassing semiospheres, on the one hand, and by visions of the utopian communicative potential of new media like the internet, on the other, see national and ethnic paradigms as easily superseded by transnational agendas. By differentiating between various forms of transnational ideals and ideas in historical and geographical perspective since the Renaissance, the contributors aim to rediscover distinctions -- for instance between transnationalisms and cosmopolitanisms -- which neo-liberal transnational euphoria has tended to erase.

A work of rare scope and power that grapples with the big questions: Is happiness the proper end of life, as the Greeks conceived it to be, or is life, as it appears since the early English novel, an endless trial?--Adam Potkay

In this volume, Lebbady has compiled and translated seven Andalusi women''s tales from the north of Morocco, and analyzes them from a postcolonial theoretical perspective, finding in the women far more wit and agency than western stereotypes would suggest.

This book rethinks the origins and nature of magical realism and provides detailed readings of key novels by Asturias, Carpentier, García Márquez, Rushdie, and Okri. Identifying two different strands of the mode, one characterized by faith, the other by irreverence, Warnes makes available a new vocabulary for the discussion of magical realism.