Exotic Encounters
Exotic Encounters

Author: Brian Stableford

Publisher: Wildside Press LLC

Published: 2009-11-01

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1434457605

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Thirty-four review essays of science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors and musical groups, including works by the following: Poul Anderson, Kim Antieau, Jackie Askew, Ataraxia, Stephen Baxter, Gregory Benford, David Britton, Philip George Chadwick, Hal Clement, Kathryn Cramer, Avram Davidson, Grania Davis, Stephen Dedman, Marcus Donnelly, Greg Egan, Michael Flynn, Forkbeard Fantasy, Neil Gaiman, Glenn Grant, Charles L. Harness, David G. Hartwell, Alexander Jablokov, John Kessel, Sophia Kingshill, Nancy Kress, Manuela Dunn Mascetti, Paul McAuley, Tim Powers, Albert Robida, Mary Doria Russell, William Moy Russell, Sharon Shinn, Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows, Emile Souvestre, Michel de Spiegeleire, Allen Steele, Michael Swanwick, Judith Tarr, Thee Vampire Guild, Jeff VanderMeer, Freda Warrington, John D. Wilson, Terri Windling, and Ronald Wright.

Penguins, Pineapples & Pangolins
Penguins, Pineapples & Pangolins

Author: Claire Cock-Starkey

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780712356367

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In these modern times knowledge is at our fingertips and it can sometimes feel as if there is nothing new to discover. The awe and excitement from that moment has been lost because these objects and experiences have become ordinary to us. But if we travel back in time just a few hundred years, adventurers were exploring the world during a period when most people rarely travelled further than their nearest market town. Penguins, Pineapples and Pangolins captures the wonderment these intrepid explorers felt as they struggled to record their new experiences. The eyewitness accounts in this collection reveal the reactions and thoughts of Europeans as they visited new places, tasted new foods and encountered strange animals, peoples and plants for the very first time.

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy
Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy

Author: Jérôme Brillaud

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-03-25

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 135016092X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting. With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan Suleiman, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology, and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century, while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches.

Cultural Encounters and Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka
Cultural Encounters and Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka

Author: Robert Aldrich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-17

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1317805291

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ceylon, or Sri Lanka, was long known to travellers for its luxuriant landscapes, colourful temples and friendly inhabitants – the island once named Serendip. This book explores the sojourns of gay visitors from the late 1800s to the modern day, providing a history of homosexuality, travel and cultural encounter on the island. The book offers profiles of major figures in Sri Lankan culture and of homosexual visitors, both famous and infamous, to the island. It discusses the experiences of sojourners including the Victorian social reformer Edward Carpenter and the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, such British and American writers as Paul Bowles and Arthur C. Clarke, and the Australian painter Donald Friend. It also pays particular attention to Lionel Wendt, one of the most important modernist photographers outside Europe. For these figures, an erotic appreciation of young men whom they encountered mixed with interest in Sinhalese art, Buddhist and Hindu spirituality, and the flora and fauna of the island. Their experiences influenced modern writing, art and dance. Cultural influences moved in both directions, however, and Sri Lankans also found inspiration from abroad. The book argues that homosexuals played a major role in the transmission of cultural influences from Sri Lanka to the rest of the world, and from the wider world to this Indian Ocean island. Providing an original analysis of gay cultures in Sri Lanka from Victorian encounters to the present day, this book is the first study of Sri Lanka as a site of gay travel. An excellent study of trans-national cultural exchange, sexuality and the relationships between them, it will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian Studies, Colonial History and Gay and Queer Studies.

Encountering Ephemera 1500-1800
Encountering Ephemera 1500-1800

Author: Joshua B. Fisher

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-07-24

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1443864854

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume addresses two key questions: 1) How can ephemera be understood as a critical category of literary and historical inquiry? and 2) How can ephemera serve pedagogical purposes in the classroom? Each of the essays in Encountering Ephemera 1550-1800: Scholarship, Performance, Classroom addresses these questions by exploring a diverse range of materials as well as periods. The essays collectively work to define ephemera as a complex and multi-faceted critical category in terms of its literary, cultural, and historical significance. Each contributor works to complicate the traditional binary opposition between the ephemeral/transitory and the canonical/enduring, in part by recognizing how attending to the material processes of textual production, transmission, and dissemination highlights the potential instability and mutability of texts (and textual relationships), whether discussing broadside ballads or coterie poetry. By shifting the focus to the processes by which texts are constructed and construed, the prospect of recognizing any text (regardless of its canonical status) as a static and fixed entity becomes difficult and, in turn, the ephemeral qualities that define and constitute the text’s materiality come more sharply into focus. Along these lines, the “ephemeral spaces” across and between discourses – what might be called the “ephemera of cultural poetics” – play a key role in shaping literary texts. Thus, early modern and eighteenth century ephemera constitute both the material (texts not intended to last or designed for limited cultural life) and the process (fleeting and transitory aspects of cultural production). Whether discussing the circulation of cheap print, the performative traces of music and gesture in Shakespeare’s plays, or the diffuse cultural influences that both surround and pervade literary texts, attending to ephemeral matters underscores the dynamic unfixity of early modern and eighteenth century cultural practices.

Encountering the City
Encountering the City

Author: Jonathan Darling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-15

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1317143957

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Encountering the City provides a new and sustained engagement with the concept of encounter. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical work, classic writings on the city and rich empirical examples, this volume demonstrates why encounters are significant to urban studies, politically, philosophically and analytically. Bringing together a range of interests, from urban multiculture, systems of economic regulation, security and suspicion, to more-than-human geographies, soundscapes and spiritual experience, Encountering the City argues for a more nuanced understanding of how the concept of 'encounter' is used. This interdisciplinary collection thus provides an insight into how scholars' writing on and in the city mobilise, theorise and challenge the concept of encounter through empirical cases taken from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. These cases go beyond conventional accounts of urban conviviality, to demonstrate how encounters destabilise, rework and produce difference, fold together complex temporalities, materialise power and transform political relations. In doing so, the collection retains a critical eye on the forms of regulation, containment and inequality that shape the taking place of urban encounter. Encountering the City is a valuable resource for students and researchers alike.

Tango And The Political Economy Of Passion
Tango And The Political Economy Of Passion

Author: Marta Savigliano

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-06

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0429965559

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What is tango? Dance, music, and lyrics of course, but also a philosophy, a strategy, a commodity, even a disease. This book explores the politics of tango, tracing tango's travels from the brothels of Buenos Aires to the cabarets of Paris and the shako dansu clubs of Tokyo. The author is an Argentinean political theorist and a dance professor at the University of California at Riverside. She uses her ?tango tongue? to tell interwoven tales of sexuality, gender, race, class, and national identity. Along the way she unravels relations between machismo and colonialism, postmodernism and patriarchy, exoticism and commodification. In the end she arrives at a discourse on decolonization as intellectual ?unlearning.?Marta Savigliano's voice is highly personal and political. Her account is at once about the exoticization of tango and about her own fate as a Third World woman intellectual. A few sentences from the preface are indicative: ?Tango is my womb and my tongue, a trench where I can shelter and resist the colonial invitations to '`'universalism,'? a stubborn fatalist mood when technocrats and theorists offer optimistic and seriously revised versions of '`'alternatives' for the Third World, an opportunistic metaphor to talk about myself and my stories as a success' of the civilization-development-colonization of Am ca Latina, and a strategy to figure out through the history of the tango a hooked-up story of people like myself. Tango is my changing, resourceful source of identity. And because I am where I am?outside?tango hurts and comforts me: '`'Tango is a sad thought that can be danced.'?Savigliano employs the tools of ethnography, history, body-movement analysis, and political economy. Well illustrated with drawings and photos dating back to the 1880s, this book is highly readable, entertaining, and provocative. It is sure to be recognized as an important contribution in the fields of cultural studies, performance studies, decolonization, and women-of-color feminism.

Venus Signs
Venus Signs

Author: Jessica Shepherd

Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide

Published: 2015-01-08

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0738744476

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Use the wisdom of your Venus sign to create, laugh, and love with irresistible confidence. For millennia, Venus sauntered through the history books with unrivaled self-possession and sexual self-confidence. Yet many women today long for connection with the very aspects of their inner selves that Venus represents: pleasure, joy, self-worth, sexual vitality, and eroticism. In Venus Signs, Jessica Shepherd breathes life back into the Goddess. Whether you're recovering from heartbreak or could use a jolt of joy, beauty, and truth about who you truly are, Venus power will help you get in touch with your innermost desires and your sensual self. Discover the must-have qualities of your soulmate, how to keep a long-term relationship happily humming along, how to align with your own feminine energy, and how to draw your deepest heart's desires toward you. Use the tools in this book to gain insights into your significant other and support your friends and loved ones. Praise: "[A]n ideal entry point for those looking to delve a litte deeper into astrology beyond Sun-Signs."—Dell Horoscope "Jessica Shepherd has done it again. I heartily recommend Venus Signs to anyone who loves astrology—or, simply, to anyone who loves at all."—Steven Forrest, author of The Inner Sky, Yesterday's Sky and The Book of the Moon "Jessica left me feeling known, understood, appreciated and loved, just what you'd expect to find in a real cosmic caress from Venus herself. This is the ultimate self-worth booster. Loved it!"—Neil D. Paris, author of Surfing Your Solar Cycles: A Lifetime Guide to Your Stars "Venus Signs will get you in touch with what generates and sustains your pleasure and happiness, both in lifestyle and in relationships. By defining the influence of Venus through the looking glass of the Zodiac, Jessica sheds light on how the essential qualities of love and attraction are best fulfilled within us and within those whom we love and treasure."—Annie Bones, author of Celestial Forecaster "In the context of astrology, Jessica encourages us to embrace our "inner Venus," according to our sign, bringing forth the sensual feminine, artistic vixen, relationship artist that swirls inside, waiting."—Cyndi Dale, author of The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy "Jessica has a gift for weaving together many intricate details into a powerful archetypal synthesis that is accessible and deep."—Sherene Vismaya Schostak, author of Surviving Saturn Return "Reading about yourself in a good Venus book (something even seasoned astrologers love to do) should feel both pleasurable and startling—as though the author had been reading the diary of your secret thoughts. Jessica Shepherd has such a gift, seeming to know from the inside out just how it feels to have each Venus—and how it feels be in a relationship with each Venus sign. A wise and soulful coach, Jessica lights the way towards each sign's most evolved (and happiest) expression. Her prose is fresh, supple and seductive, as though it was Venus herself who'd been doing the typing."—Dana Gerhardt, columnist with The Mountain Astrologer

Alimentary Orientalism
Alimentary Orientalism

Author: Yin Yuan

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2023-06-16

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1684484685

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What, exactly, did tea, sugar, and opium mean in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain? Alimentary Orientalism reassesses the politics of Orientalist representation by examining the contentious debates surrounding these exotic, recently popularized, and literally consumable things. It suggests that the interwoven discourses sparked by these commodities transformed the period’s literary Orientalism and created surprisingly self-reflexive ways through which British writers encountered and imagined cultural otherness. Tracing exotic ingestion as a motif across a range of authors and genres, this book considers how, why, and whither writers used scenes of eating, drinking, and smoking to diagnose and interrogate their own solipsistic constructions of the Orient. As national and cultural boundaries became increasingly porous, such self-reflexive inquiries into the nature and role of otherness provided an unexpected avenue for British imperial subjectivity to emerge and coalesce.

Center and periphery: Twenty-first-century literature, cinema, media from Spain
Center and periphery: Twenty-first-century literature, cinema, media from Spain

Author: Amparo Alpañés

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2025-01-07

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In a country where the richness of diverse cultures is often overshadowed by historical conflicts, this book delves into the complex relationship between the so-called “center” and “periphery” within Spain’s borders. Traditionally, the center has symbolized Castilian identity, while the periphery encompassed other regional cultures. But in today’s rapidly evolving social landscape, what do these terms really mean? This groundbreaking work reexamines the “center vs. periphery” paradigm through the lens of contemporary Spanish literature, cinema, and media. It poses critical questions about the existence and nature of a unified Spanish identity and investigates whether the tension between these cultural spheres persists. The book also challenges readers to consider which aspects—linguistic, gender, or other forms of identity—play the most significant role in this dynamic. Furthermore, it scrutinizes whether marginalized groups such as BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and differently-abled communities are relegated to the periphery in modern Spain. With no other published work focusing on these issues in 21st-century Spain, this book offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on cultural tensions that have shaped and continue to shape the nation. Its innovative approach makes it an indispensable reference for researchers and students in gender and women’s studies, Queer studies, media studies, Spanish literature, and language, as well as those exploring nationalism, separatism, race, and Blackness.