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Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2022-11-21
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 9004525300
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis groundbreaking collection of essays shows how the American Western has been reimagined in different national contexts, producing fictions that interrogate, reframe, and remix the genre in unexpectedly critical ways.
Author: Ekaterina V. Kobeleva
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2019-01-03
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 1527524108
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis collection explores nautical themes in a variety of literary contexts from multiple cultures. Including contributors from five continents, it emphasizes the universality of human experience with the sea, while focusing on literature that spans a millennium, stretching from medieval romance to the twenty-first-century reimagining of classic literary texts in film. These fresh essays engage in discussions of literature from the UK, the USA, India, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Colombia, and the Caribbean. Scholars of maritime literature will find the collection interesting for the unique insights it offers on individual literary texts, while general readers will be intrigued by the interconnectedness that it reveals in human experience with the sea.
Author: Josh Garrett-Davis
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2019-09-26
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 080616588X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThere’s “western,” and then there’s “Western”—and where history becomes myth is an evocative question, one of several questions posed by Josh Garrett-Davis in What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination. Part cultural criticism, part history, and wholly entertaining, this series of essays on specific films, books, music, and other cultural texts brings a fresh perspective to long-studied topics. Under Garrett-Davis’s careful observation, cultural objects such as films and literature, art and artifacts, and icons and oddities occupy the terrain of where the West as region meets the Western genre. One crucial through line in the collection is the relationship of regional “western” works to genre “Western” works, and the ways those two categories cannot be cleanly distinguished—most work about the West is tinted by the Western genre, and Westerns depend on the region for their status and power. Garrett-Davis also seeks to answer the question “What is a Western now?” To do so, he brings the Western into dialogue with other frameworks of the “imagined West” such as Indigenous perspectives, the borderlands, and environmental thinking. The book’s mosaic of subject matter includes new perspectives on the classic musical film Oklahoma!, a consideration of Native activism at Standing Rock, and surprises like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. The book is influenced by the borderlands theory of Gloria Anzaldúa and the work of the indie rock band Calexico, as well as the author’s own discipline of western cultural history. Richly illustrated, primarily from the collection of the Autry Museum of the American West, Josh Garrett-Davis’s work is as visually interesting as it is enlightening, asking readers to consider the American West in new ways.
Author: Elizabeth Mcmahon
Publisher:
Published: 2019-09-16
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9781785271892
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAustralia is the planet's sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. The book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginaries of European colonisation. It prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands, both their real and material conditions and their symbolic power, from antiquity into globalised modernity. The book also traces how this spatial imaginary has shaped the modern 'man' who is imagined as being the island's mirror. The inter-relationship of the island fantasy, colonial expansion, and the literary construction of place and history, created a new 'man': the dislocated and alienated subject of post-colonial modernity. This book looks at the contradictory images of islands, from the allure of the desert island as a paradise where the world can be made anew to their roles as prisons, as these ideas are made concrete at moments of British colonialism. It also considers alternatives to viewing islands as objects of possession in the archipelagic visions of island theorists and writers. It compares the European understandings of the first and last of the new worlds, the Caribbean archipelago and the Australian island continent, to calibrate the different ways these disparate geographies unifed and fractured the concept of the planetary globe. In particular it examines the role of the island in this process, specifically its capacity to figure a 'graspable globe' in the mind. The book draws on the colonial archive and ranges across Australian literature from the first novel written and published in Australia (by a convict on the island of Tasmania) to both the ancient dreaming and the burgeoning literature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the twenty-first century. It discusses Australian literature in an international context, drawing on the long traditions of literary islands across a range of cultures. The book's approach is theoretical and engages with contemporary philosophy, which uses the island and the archipleago as a key metaphor. It is also historicist and includes considerable original historical research.
Author: Scott L. Montgomery
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 9780816519897
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Moon is at once a face with a thousand expressions and the archetypal planet. Throughout history it has been gazed upon by people of every culture in every walk of life. From early perceptions of the Moon as an abode of divine forces, humanity has in turn accepted the mathematized Moon of the Greeks, the naturalistic lunar portrait of Jan van Eyck, and the telescopic view of Galileo. Scott Montgomery has produced a richly detailed analysis of how the Moon has been visualized in Western culture through the ages, revealing the faces it has presented to philosophers, writers, artists, and scientists for nearly three millennia. To do this, he has drawn on a wide array of sources that illustrate mankind's changing concept of the nature and significance of heavenly bodies from classical antiquity to the dawn of modern science. Montgomery especially focuses on the seventeenth century, when the Moon was first mapped and its features named. From literary explorations such as Francis Godwin's Man in the Moone and Cyrano de Bergerac's L'autre monde to Michael Van Langren's textual lunar map and Giambattista Riccioli's Almagestum novum, he shows how Renaissance man was moved by the lunar orb, how he battled to claim its surface, and how he in turn elevated the Moon to a new level in human awareness. The effect on human imagination has been cumulative: our idea of the Moon, and therefore the planets, is multilayered and complex, having been enriched by associations played out in increasingly complicated harmonies over time. We have shifted the way we think about the lunar face from a "perfect" body to an earthlike one, with corresponding changes in verbal and visual expression. Ultimately, Montgomery suggests, our concept of the Moon has never wandered too far from the world we know best—the Earth itself. And when we finally establish lunar bases and take up some form of residence on the Moon's surface, we will not be conquering a New World, fresh and mostly unknown, but a much older one, ripe with history.
Author: Sergei I. Zhuk
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2024-06-18
Total Pages: 243
ISBN-13: 1666943681
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe KGB, Russian Academic Imperialism, Ukraine, and Western Academia, 1946-2024 is a study of Soviet and Russian intelligence operations against the centers for Soviet studies in North American academia. Using recently opened archival KGB and US intelligence documents, memoirs, and personal interviews with former KGB officers in post-Soviet Ukraine, this book analyzes the Soviet strategy of "using their enemies" for promoting their own political interests, especially directed at the problems of Ukrainian nationalism and independence. This volume investigates KGB operations establishing a foothold within the American Slavic studies community during the Cold War. The KGB, and their current successors the Russian FSB, use Russian emigrants and academics to promote pro-Kremlin and pro-Putin myths within North American research institutes. Special attention is paid to the historical roots of contemporary Russian intelligence operations targeting American-Russian academics and promoting Russian state interests in the ongoing war against Ukraine.
Author: Barry McCrea
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-03-01
Total Pages: 198
ISBN-13: 0300190565
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book argues that the sudden decline of old rural vernaculars – such as French patois, Italian dialects, and the Irish language – caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections that were formative of modernist writing. Seán Ó Ríordáin in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages to use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist conception of Irish as a lost, perfect language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the origins and meaning of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how the vanishing languages of the European countryside influenced metropolitan literary culture in fundamental ways.
Author: Lawrence Buell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 604
ISBN-13: 9780674258624
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWith Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, Buell offers an account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more “ecocentric” way of being. In doing so, he provides a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.
Author: Sanja Runtić
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2024-01-03
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9819974216
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book examines the ways in which North American Indigenous identity has been (re)imagined, represented, and negotiated in German, Croatian, Italian, Polish, and Czech culture. Employing a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach and drawing on a range of media—from literature, comics, and film to photography, painting, and the performative arts—across different historical and cultural backgrounds, it aims to both contribute innovative scholarship on Indigenous studies in Europe and open a new avenue in the field by focusing on Central European settings that have received little or no critical attention to date. The book’s novelty also comes from its focus on the latest developments in the field, including the “Ravensburger/Winnetou controversy,” which swept across Europe in 2022, echoing the 2017 Canadian debate over Indigenous appropriation and free speech. It seeks to provide a sound reference and lay the groundwork for future scholarship by opening up a conversation on how Indigenous identities have been portrayed in Central European literature and media texts. To this end, it not only addresses generalized expectations about North American Indigenous people underlying (Central) European public discourse and imagination but also questions whether and to what extent some of the ingrained stereotypical views and practices, such as hobbyism, have been challenged in the face of Indigenous resurgence, rapidly changing media and information-sharing realities, and global cultural shifts. The closing interview with Métis playwright, actor, and director Bruce Sinclair underscores one of the book’s key goals—to spark an informed cross-cultural dialogue that will reveal the mechanisms of, as well as the contradictions and tensions inherent in, the politics of Indigenous representation in (Central) European cultural industries and encourage (Central) Europeans to confront their own cultural assumptions and attitudes.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2024-07-15
Total Pages: 226
ISBN-13: 9004704442
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book presents papers by eleven European scholars that explore the ambivalent representations of an American West that follows “no single trajectory, creating instead a series of lines and rhythms, always moving, crossing, and folding” (Neil Campbell). The papers explore the use of the American West as an ideal or a realistic setting in different cultural productions, ranging from music (“Sing-along Melodies of the West”) to film (“Western Images in Motion”) or comics (“Graphic Representations of the American West”), and including popular cultural fields like podcasts, fashion, and gastronomy (“Performing the West”).
