Obscenity
Obscenity

Author: Jan M. Ziolkowski

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9789004109285

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This volume makes most wide-ranging attempt ever to probe the natures, origins, and consequences of obscenity in medieval literature, art, theater, and law. One large section examines obscenity in medieval French literature, especially fabliaux; but the rest of the book explores obscenity in cultures and languages of other regions in Europe.

Game
Game

Author: Tom Tyler

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1452964610

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A playful reflection on animals and video games, and what each can teach us about the other Video games conjure new worlds for those who play them, human or otherwise: they’ve been played by cats, orangutans, pigs, and penguins, and they let gamers experience life from the perspective of a pet dog, a predator or a prey animal, or even a pathogen. In Game, author Tom Tyler provides the first sustained consideration of video games and animals and demonstrates how thinking about animals and games together can prompt fresh thinking about both. Game comprises thirteen short essays, each of which examines a particular video game, franchise, aspect of gameplay, or production in which animals are featured, allowing us to reflect on conventional understandings of humans, animals, and the relationships between them. Tyler contemplates the significance of animals who insert themselves into video games, as protagonists, opponents, and brute resources, but also as ciphers, subjects, and subversive guides to new ways of thinking. These animals encourage us to reconsider how we understand games, contesting established ideas about winning and losing, difficulty settings, accessibility, playing badly, virtuality, vitality and vulnerability, and much more. Written in a playful style, Game draws from a dizzying array of sources, from children’s television, sitcoms, and regional newspapers to medieval fables, Shakespearean tragedy, and Edwardian comedy; from primatology, entomology, and hunting and fishing manuals to theological tracts and philosophical treatises. By examining video games through the lens of animals and animality, Tyler leads us to a greater humility regarding the nature and status of the human creature, and a greater sensitivity in dealings with other animals.

Ausonius: Epigrams
Ausonius: Epigrams

Author: Bloomsbury Publishing

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-03-02

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1472502426

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Decimus Magnus Ausonius of Bordeaux, whose life spanned the greater part of the fourth century AD, was one of the most significant literary and political figures of his age. After an academic career in his native Gaul he was appointed tutor to the future emperor Gratian, a position through which he achieved great power for himself and his family. He was made consul in 379 and later lived to enjoy a ripe old age as the grand old man of Latin letters. In this modern edition of Ausonius' short poems, collected together under the general heading of epigrams, N.M. Kay gives a line-by-line commentary dealing with points of literary, linguistic, historical and other interest. The epigrams throw light on many aspects of Ausonius' life, career and attitudes as well as on fourth-century Latin literature, and will thus be of interest to students of the fourth-century western world, of Latin literature, and of the epigram form in particular. This edition includes both Latin text and translation.

The Woman Without a Hole - & Other Risky Themes from Old Japanese Poems
The Woman Without a Hole - & Other Risky Themes from Old Japanese Poems

Author: Robin D. Gill

Publisher: Paraverse Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 0974261882

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17-syllabet Japanese poems about human foibles, sans season (i.e., not haiku), were introduced a half-century ago by RH Blyth in two books, "Edo Satirical Verse Anthologies" and "Japanese Life and Character in Senryu." Blyth regretted having to introduce not the best senryu, but only the best that were clean enough to pass the censors. In this anthology, compiled, translated and essayed by Robin D. Gill, like Blyth, a renowned translator of thousands of haiku, we find 1,300 of the senryu (and zappai) that would once have been dangerous to publish. The book is not just an anthology of dirty poems such as Legman's classic "Limericks" or Burford's delightful "Bawdy Verse," but probing essays of thirty themes representative of the eros - both real and imaginary - of Edo, at the time, the world's largest city. Japanese themselves use senryu for historical documentation of social attitudes and cultural practices; thousands of senryu (and the related zappai), including many poems we might consider obscene, serve as examples in the Japanese equivalent of the OED (nipponkokugodaijiten). The specialized argot, obscure allusions and ellipsis that make reading dirty senryu a delightful riddle for one who knows just enough to be challenged yet not defeated, make them impenetrable to outsiders, so this educational yet entertaining resource has not been accessible to most students of Japanese (and the limited translations prove that even professors have difficulty with it). This book tries to accomplish the impossible: it includes all the information - original poems, pronunciation, explanation, glossary - needed to help specialists improve their senryu reading skills, while refraining from full citations to leave plenty of room for the curious monolingual to skip about the eclectic goodies. [Published simultaneously with two titles as an experiment.]

Technique and Technology
Technique and Technology

Author: Adrian Armstrong

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780198159896

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Literary studies cannot neglect the study of books, the physical objects through which literary texts are transmitted. Book form is especially relevant to the literature of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which saw the crucial shift from manuscript to print in Western Europe.This book examines manuscripts and printed editions of three major French writers of this key period: Jean Molinet, Jean Lemaire de Belges and Jean Bouchet. Presentational features which influence the reading of poems, such as layout, illustration, anthologization and paratext, are analysed. Thedevelopment of these features reflects a gradual change in the ways in which literary self-consciousness is manifested. In earlier texts, produced within an essentially manuscript culture, poets' creative investment in their work is exhibited primarily as formal virtuosity. As printing becomesdominant, such virtuosity tends to be rejected in favour of self-commentary and an apparently more personal discourse.

Encyclopedia of American Humorists
Encyclopedia of American Humorists

Author: Steven H. Gale

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-14

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 1317362276

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First published in 1988, this book contains entries on famous American Humorists. Humor has been present in American literature, from the beginning, and has developed characteristics that reflect the American character, both regional and national. Although American literature was, in the past, treated as inferior to British literature, there has always been a large popular audience for the genre, which this book shows. The figures with entries in this encyclopedia not only amuse in their writing, but also aim to enlighten- setting out to expose the foibles and foolishness of society and the individuals who compose it. It is the manner in which these authors try to accomplish this end that determines whether they appear in the volume. Indeed, the book will demonstrate that the best humor has at its base, a ready understanding of human nature.

Manuscript Matters
Manuscript Matters

Author: Lara M. Crowley

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0192554964

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Manuscript Matters illuminates responses to some of John Donne's most elusive texts by his contemporary audiences. Since examples of seventeenth-century literary criticism prove somewhat rare and frequently ambiguous, this book emphasizes a critical framework rarely used for exhibiting early readers' exegeses of literary texts: the complete manuscripts containing them. Many literary manuscripts that include poems by Donne and his contemporaries were compiled during their lifetimes, often by members of their circles. For this reason, and because various early modern poems and prose works satirize topical events and prominent figures in highly coded language, attempting to understand early literary interpretations proves challenging but highly valuable. Compilers, scribes, owners, and other readers–men and women who shared in Donne's political, religious, and social contexts–offer clues to their literary responses within a range of features related to the construction and subsequent use of the manuscripts. This study's findings call us to investigate more extensively and systematically how certain early manuscripts were constructed through analysis of such features as scripts, titles, sequence of contents, ascriptions, and variant diction. While such studies can throw light on many early modern texts, exploring artefacts containing Donne's works proves particularly useful because more of his poetry circulated in manuscript than did that of any other early modern poet. Manuscript Matters engages Donne's satiric, lyric, and religious poetry, as well as his prose paradoxes and problems. Analysing his texts within their manuscript contexts enables modern readers to interpret Donne's poetry and prose through an early modern lens.