Stewart Justman presents Western literature from Shakespeare, Dickens, and others, to show how they changed the appearance of literature with new ways of constructing a tale.
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to this emerging field, offering a broad overview of human rights and literature while providing innovative readings on key topics. The first of its kind, this volume covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines between the social sciences and humanities. Sections cover: subjects, with pieces on subjectivity, humanity, identity, gender, universality, the particular, the body forms, visiting the different ways human rights stories are crafted and formed via the literary, the visual, the performative, and the oral contexts, tracing the development of the literature over time and in relation to specific regions and historical events impacts, considering the power and limits of human rights literature, rhetoric, and visual culture Drawn from many different global contexts, the essays offer an ideal introduction for those approaching the study of literature and human rights for the first time, looking for new insights and interdisciplinary perspectives, or interested in new directions for future scholarship. Contributors: Chris Abani, Jonathan E. Abel, Elizabeth S. Anker, Arturo Arias, Ariella Azoulay, Ralph Bauer, Anna Bernard, Brenda Carr Vellino, Eleni Coundouriotis, James Dawes, Erik Doxtader, Marc D. Falkoff, Keith P. Feldman, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Audrey J. Golden, Mark Goodale, Barbara Harlow, Wendy S. Hesford, Peter Hitchcock, David Holloway, Christine Hong, Madelaine Hron, Meg Jensen, Luz Angélica Kirschner, Susan Maslan, Julie Avril Minich, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Greg Mullins, Laura T. Murphy, Hanna Musiol, Makau Mutua, Zoe Norridge, David Palumbo-Liu, Crystal Parikh, Katrina M. Powell, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Mark Sanders, Karen-Magrethe Simonsen, Joseph R. Slaughter, Sharon Sliwinski, Sidonie Smith, Domna Stanton, Sarah G. Waisvisz, Belinda Walzer, Ban Wang, Julia Watson, Gillian Whitlock and Sarah Winter.
Set at the intersection of Human Rights, social justice and Literature, this cutting edge book examines a range of literary texts, fiction, plays and poetry, and through them considers representations of Human Rights and their violations. Examining violated bodies and subjects, the settings and environments in which these are embedded and the witnessing of atrocities, it considers how the ‘subject’ (or ‘person’ of Human Rights) emerges within fiction or poetry. Structured so as to move outward from the individual body to the world, the study progresses from the preconditions or settings for Human Rights violations through to atrocity, from witnessing to the making of a specific kind of public around traumatic recall. It addresses representations of destroyed corporeality and subjectivity, the violations and dissolution of the subject and the construction of trauma-memory citizenship to the making of communities of mourning. Through a broad study of texts from different genres, this text reveals how Literature both documents the basic human aspirations of happiness, security and hope, but also the limitations and the violations of these aspirations.
This sophisticated book argues that human rights literature both helps the persecuted to cope with their trauma and serves as the foundation for a cosmopolitan ethos of universal civility—a culture without borders. Michael Galchinsky maintains that, no matter how many treaties there are, a rights-respecting world will not truly exist until people everywhere can imagine it. The Modes of Human Rights Literature describes four major forms of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter to reveal how such works give common symbolic forms to widely held sociopolitical emotions.
The Novel of Human Rights defines a new, dynamic American literary genre. It incorporates key debates within the contemporary human rights movement in the United States, and in turn influences the ideas and rhetoric of that discourse. In James Dawes’s framing, the novel of human rights takes as its theme a range of atrocities at home and abroad, scrambling the distinction between human rights within and beyond national borders. Some novels critique America’s conception of human rights by pointing out U.S. exploitation of international crises. Other novels endorse an American ethos of individualism and citizenship as the best hope for global equality. Some narratives depict human rights workers as responding to an urgent ethical necessity, while others see only inefficient institutions dedicated to their own survival. Surveying the work of Chris Abani, Susan Choi, Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Nathan Englander, Francisco Goldman, Anthony Marra, and John Edgar Wideman, among others, Dawes finds traces of slave narratives, Holocaust literature, war novels, and expatriate novels, along with earlier traditions of justice writing. The novel of human rights responds to deep forces within America’s politics, society, and culture, Dawes shows. His illuminating study clarifies many ethical dilemmas of today’s local and global politics and helps us think our way, through them, to a better future. Vibrant and modern, the human rights novel reflects our own time and aspires to shape the world we will leave for those who come after.
How can children grow to realize their inherent human rights and respect the rights of others? This book explores this question through children's literature from Peter Rabbit to Horton Hears a Who! to Harry Potter. The authors investigate children's rights under international law - identity and family rights, the right to be heard, the right to be free from discrimination, and other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights - and consider the way in which those rights are embedded in children's literature. This book traverses children's rights law, literary theory, and human rights education to argue that in order for children to fully realize their human rights, they first have to imagine and understand them.
This book proposes feminist empathy as a model of interpretation in the works of contemporary Anglophone African women writers. The African woman’s body is often portrayed as having been disabled by the patriarchal and sexist structures of society. Returning to their bodies as a point of reference, rather than the postcolonial ideology of empire, contemporaryAfrican women writers demand fairness and equality. By showing how this literature deploys imaginative shifts in perspective with women experiencing unfairness, injustice, or oppression because of their gender, Chielozona Eze argues that by considering feminist empathy, discussions open up about how this literature directly addresses the systems that put them in disadvantaged positions. This book, therefore, engages a new ethical and human rights awareness in African literary and cultural discourses, highlighting the openness to reality that is compatible with African multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and increasingly cosmopolitan communities.
The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking rights seriously has never been more urgent. The eighteen essays which comprise Literature and Human Rights are written as a contribution to this vital debate. Each moreover is written in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, reaching across the myriad constitutive disciplines of law, literature and the humanities in order to present an array of alternative perspectives on the nature and meaning of human rights in the modern world. The taking of human rights seriously, it will be suggested, depends just as much on taking seriously the idea of the human as it does the idea of rights.
Lyndsey Stonebridge presents a new way to think about the relationship between literature and human rights that challenges the idea that empathy inspires action.