From New York Times and Globe and Mail bestselling author Joy Fielding comes a pulse-racing story of a harmless bet gone deadly wrong. This is how it starts. With a joke. Two brothers - Will and Jeff - and their friend Tom are out one night at their favorite South Beach bar when they decide to make a bet on who can be the first to seduce a mysterious-looking young woman drinking by herself. Pretty, dark-haired, blue-eyed Suzy has an innocent - almost ordinary - girl-next-door way about her. "Just waiting for Prince Charming to hit on her," Jeff says. But Suzy isn't as naive as she seems. And she has an agenda of her own. Soon another challenge is born, only this one proves to be lethal. Dark secrets, hidden passions and a story filled with intrigue, The Wild Zone will keep you in suspense until the very last page is turned.
Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.
This is a timely and comprehensive study combining various critical approaches to the fiction of Buchi Emecheta, one of Africa's most illustrious and contentious women writers. Feminist (Showalter, Cixous, Kristeva) and postcolonial approaches (writing back) are taken to Emecheta's texts to illuminate the personal, political and aesthetic ramifications of the production of this “born writer.” Poststructural programmes of analysis are shown to be less relevant to this writer’s fiction than Marxist and Bakhtinian perspectives. Emecheta is shown to be a bridge-builder between two cultures and two worlds in narratives (both challenging and popular) characterized by ambiguity, ambivalence and double-voiced discourse, all of which evince the writer's determination to expose imaginatively the colonial heritage of centre-periphery conflicts, cultural corruption, ethnic discrimination, gender oppression, and the migrant experience in multiracial communities.
Florida as symbol and myth is the subject of this collection of new critical essays exploring fiction written by female Floridian authors. In the words of author Karen Russell, the Sunshine State is "virtually past-less, seasons are out of the question, and it's built on a primordial park full of monsters." Discussing the state as setting, the essayists--also Floridians--suggest that it is a creation of the stories told about it. Each of the book's 12 chapters covers one author, including a brief biography followed by one (and twice, two) essays on some of the author's works. The book's final section includes interviews with authors Lynne Barrett, Jeannine Capo Cruz, Vicki Hendricks and Angela Hunt.
This book examines critical themes in environmental studies though theatre and performance studies. It experiments with forms along with the practice of praxis to provide radical frameworks for resilience in the contemporary age of crisis. Drawing on Ravi Sundaram’s concept of “Wild Zones”, it explores the kinetic overflows in informal sites, but also in the intimate spaces that have been realigned or shocked or fenced in, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of theatre and performance studies, environment and sustainability, and environmental humanities.
“Articulations and expressions of gender can be destabilising, transgressive, revolutionary and radical, encompassing both a painful legacy of oppression and a joyous exploration of new experience.” Analysing key texts from the 19th to 21st centuries, this book explores a range of British and Anglophone authors to contextualise women’s writing and feminist theory with ongoing debates in consciousness studies. Discussing writers who strive to redefine the gendered world of “sexualized” space, whether internal or external, mental or physical, this book argues how the “delusion” of gender difference can be addressed and challenged. In literary theory and in representations of the female body in literature, identity has increasingly become a shifting, multiple, renegotiable—and controversial—concept. While acknowledging historical and cultural constructions of sexuality, “writing the body” must ultimately incorporate knowledge of human consciousness. Here, an understanding of consciousness from contemporary science (especially quantum theory)—as the fundamental building block of existence, beyond the body—allows unique insights into literary texts to elucidate the problem of subjectivity and what it means to be human. Including discussion of topics such as feminism and androgyny, agency and entrapment, masculinities and masquerade, insanity and emotion, and individual and social empowerment, this study also creates a lively engagement with the literary process as a means of fathoming the “enigma” of consciousness. Daphne Grace is Professor of English, specializing in postcolonial and transnational literature, gender and women’s studies, in addition to British literature of the 19th to 21st centuries. She currently teaches at the University of the Bahamas, and has also previously taught at Sussex University, England, and Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus.
Focusing on U.S. slavery and its aftermath in the nineteenth century, The Archive of Fear explores the traumatic force field that continued to inflect discussions of slavery and abolition both before and after the Civil War. It challenges the long-assumed distinction between psychological and cultural-historical theories of trauma, discovering a virtual dialogue between three central U. S. writers and Sigmund Freud concerning the traumatic response of slavery's perpetrators. A strain of trauma theory and practice comes alive in the temporal and spatial disruptions of New World slavery-and The Archive of Fear shows how key elements of that theory still inform the infrastructure of race relations today. It argues that trauma theory before Freud first involves a return to an overlap between crisis, insurrection, and mesmerism found in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Mesmer's "crisis state" has long been read as the precursor to hypnosis, the tool Freud famously rejected when he created psychoanalysis. But the story of what was lost to trauma theory when Freud adopted the "talk cure" can be told through cultural disruptions of New World slavery, especially after mesmerism arrived in Saint Domingue where its implication in the Haitian revolution in both reality and fantasy had an impact on the history of emancipation in the United States.
By linguistic close-reading of more than a thousand letters from the 12th through the 18th centuries - written in Latin, Swedish, French, German, and English - this compilation analyzes the differences in language and communication between women and men. Armed with an exhaustive stylistic analysis, this volume attempts to answer the question Is there a special niche reserved for women's language? As it pinpoints the variations in how women expressed themselves when addressing men or other women, 'this detailed investigation of style and expression comes to the conclusion that there is no evidence for a particular female language; however, this authoritative work is a joy to follow for anyone interested in language, linguistics, stylistic analysis, and gender.
Female sexuality as expressed both in the art of women and in images of women in art is the focus of this collection of thirteen essays -- the second in a three-volume series on women, the arts, and society. The idea that art created by a woman has a particular relationship to the female body is explored by most of these essays.
