Sudesh Mishra was born in Suva, Fiji, and took his doctorate from the Flinders University of South Australia in 1989. He received the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for his published verse, including his collection Rahu (1987). He has since published a second volume, Tandava (1992), a passionate indictment of the 1987 coup in Fiji.
We all, as children, saw imaginary friends and heard monsters in the closet. But for Suzan Saxman, those friends and monsters didn't go away—and they weren't imaginary. They were the dead who came to her from the time she was a little girl with urgent messages for the living. Raised in a house filled with secrets, she saw and spoke the truth as soon as she could talk, alarming the nuns in her convent school with her revelations and terrifying her own mother with her strange visions. Each night she woke to see a man with no eyes watching her, and each day she kept watch by the window while her father was at work and Steve, her real father, a swarthy drifter, rendezvoused with her mother. It was the 1960s in suburban Staten Island and she tried to hide it all, and be a daughter her mother could love. Always skeptical of her tremendous gift, she struggled to come to terms with her calling even as she revealed the destinies of everyone, from housewives to hit men, stockbrokers to rock-and-rollers. She could witness everyone's future—everyone's but her own. Why was she visited by angels and demons? Could she ever escape this strange fate? Where was her own soul mate? Now Suzan tells the story of her journey and tries to make sense of her family's buried secrets. Through powerful readings of others' destinies interwoven with compelling narrative, a reluctant psychic emerges from the shadows.
This is a must-read for World War II buffs! The narrative was written from the perspective of an Eastern European youngster growing up on the losing side of the conflict during the war years. This is a saga that spans Paris in the 1930s to Sofia, Bulgarias capital, in May 1940, just prior to the victorious Nazi armies that paraded in Paris on June 14, 1940. At the time of their arrival in Sofia, Bulgaria remained neutral. On March 1, 1941, Bulgaria joined the Axis and later on declared war on the USA and Great Britain. That action invited the systematic bombing of Sofia, resulting in the family having to relocate to a safer location. The chosen location was in what used to be Northern Greece, a city called Serres, where the family lived until the fall of 1944 when the German armies were forced to retreat, which meant that the family had to move back to Sofia. At the end of the war, the family decided to leave Bulgaria as soon as possible. In spite of many obstacles, the family was able to reunite in Prague and, from there, spent some time in a couple of displaced persons (DP) camps in Rome and Naples. Eventually, they sailed from Naples to Buenos Aires and five years later, flew to New York City, the final desired destination.
A fiercely honest and unvarnished autobiography from Ireland's most successful and controversial living artist. Making his name as a Pop artist in the late 1960s and 70s, Robert Ballagh quickly achieved an international reputation. With little formal artistic training, he triumphed in his field despite often formidable hostility. His work was also strikingly topical and political, playing with classic images by Goya or Delacroix to express outrage about the situation in Northern Ireland. But it is his series of realistic portraits of writers, politicians and fellow artists – often searingly inquisitive and moving in equal measure – that have won him lasting fame. His subjects include Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, James Watson, Francis Crick, Harold Pinter and Fidel Castro. And his remarkable self-portraits unsparingly document the process of his own ageing. This memoir is also a story of Ireland over the past sixty years, its violence, hypocrisy and immobility as well as its creativity and generosity.
Did you enjoy the fair when it came to your town or village? Did you ever wonder about the show people... the families who travelled countrywide, and perhaps even envy them?
This third volume of ASNEL Papers covers a wide range of theoretical and thematic approaches to the subject of intertextuality. Intertextual relations between oral and written versions of literature, text and performance, as well as problems emerging from media transitions, regionally instructed forms of intertextuality, and the works of individual authors are equally dealt with. Intertextuality as both a creative and a critical practice frequently exposes the essential arbitrariness of literary and cultural manifestations that have become canonized. The transformation and transfer of meanings which accompanies any crossing between texts rests not least on the nature of the artistic corpus embodied in the general framework of historically and socially determined cultural traditions. Traditions, however, result from selective forms of perception; they are as much inventions as they are based on exclusion. Intertextuality leads to a constant reinforcement of tradition, while, at the same time, intertextual relations between the new literatures and other English-language literatures are all too obvious. Despite the inevitable impact of tradition, the new literatures tend to employ a dynamic reading of culture which fosters social process and transition, thus promoting transcultural rather than intercultural modes of communication. Writing and reading across borders becomes a dialogue which reveals both differences and similarities. More than a decolonizing form of deconstruction, intertextuality is a strategy for communicating meaning across cultural boundaries.
For so long figured in European discourses as the antithesis of modernity, the Pacific Islands have remained all but absent from the modernist studies’ critical map. Yet, as the chapters of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific collectively show, Pacific artists and writers have been as creatively engaged in the construction and representation of modernity as any of their global counterparts. In the second half of the twentieth century, driving a still ongoing process of decolonisation, Pacific Islanders forged an extraordinary cultural and artistic movement. Integrating Indigenous aesthetics, forms, and techniques with a range of other influences — realist novels, avant-garde poetry, anti-colonial discourse, biblical verse, Indian mythology, American television, Bollywood film — Pacific artists developed new creative registers to express the complexity of the region’s transnational modernities. New Oceania presents the first sustained account of the modernist dimensions of this period, while presenting timely reflections on the ideological and methodological limitations of the global modernism rubric. Breaking new critical ground, it brings together scholars from a range of backgrounds to demonstrate the relevance of modernism for Pacific scholars, and the relevance of Pacific literature for modernist scholars.
In this study, ten independent critical essays and a coda explore the English-language poetry of South Asians in terms of time, place, themes and poetic methodologies. The transnational perspective taken establishes connections between colonial and postcolonial South Asian poetry in English as well as the poetry of the old and new diaspora and the Subcontinent. The poetry analysis covers the relevance of historical allusions as well as underlying concerns of gender, ethnicity and class. Comparisons are offered between poets of different places and time periods, yielding numerous sociopolitical paradigms that surface in the poetry.