Exile and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination is a collection of essays examining a variety of narrative and poetic responses to exile. Intended to complement existing scholarship on exile, these essays discuss works from very different parts of the world, some of them relatively rarely studied through the lens of exile, including Armenia, Egypt, Tibet, and Liberia. The book is divided into five parts, each discussing different aspects of this condition such as feelings of loss and loneliness, memories of trauma, and the search for identity.
Exile and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination is a collection of essays examining a variety of narrative and poetic responses to exile. Intended to complement existing scholarship on exile, these essays discuss works from very different parts of the world, some of them relatively rarely studied through the lens of exile, including Armenia, Egypt, Tibet, and Liberia. The book is divided into five parts, each discussing different aspects of this condition such as feelings of loss and loneliness, memories of trauma, and the search for identity.
Asian American literature is one of the most recent forms of ethnic literature and is already becoming one of the most prominent, given the large number of writers, the growing ethnic population from the region, the general receptivity of this body of work, and the quality of the authors. In recent decades, there has been an exponential growth in their output and much Asian American literature has now achieved new levels of popular success and critical acclaim. Nurtured by rich and long literary traditions from the vast continent of Asia, this literature is poised between the ancient and the modern, between the East and West, and between the oral and the written. The Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater covers the activities in this burgeoning field. First, its history is traced year by year from 1887 to the present, in a chronology, and the introduction provides a good overview. The most important section is the dictionary, with over 600 substantial and cross-referenced entries on authors, books, and genres as well as more general ones describing the historical background, cultural features, techniques and major theatres and clubs. More reading can be found through an extensive bibliography with general works and those on specific authors. The book is thus a good place to get started, or to expanded one's horizons, about a branch of American literature that can only grow in importance.
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.
Results May Vary addresses the unspoken assumptions and unquestioned expectations about what it means to be a Christian woman in a complex world. Far from offering a simple checklist or selling advice, this collection of essays weaves together a rich variety of voices--from women of different ages, backgrounds, professions, disciplines, and life choices--speaking honestly about the unexpected yet grace-infused twists and turns of life that exude the faithfulness of God in every unanticipated detail. For young women in their twenties and thirties tackling post-college life, Results May Vary offers the wry and diverse stories of real women grappling with real-world issues like friendship, health, money, ambition, vocation, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, and spiritual life.
A vibrant introduction to theatre that engages with stories, conditions and experiences of migration. Arguing that migration is crucially about encounters with foreignness, Emma Cox traces international histories of migration and considers key issues in contemporary performance - from Cape Town and Melbourne, to London and Toronto.
This book makes an important contribution to cultural analysis by opening up the work of two canonical authors to issues of exile and migration. Barbara Straumann's close reading of selected films and literary texts focuses on Speak, Memory, Lolita, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Suspicion, North by Northwest and Shadow of a Doubt and explores the connections between language, imagination and exile. Invoking psychoanalysis as the principal discourse of dislocation, the book not only uses concepts such as 'screen memory', 'family romance', 'fantasy' and 'the uncanny' as hermeneutic foils, it also argues that, in their own ways, the arch-parodists Hitchcock and Nabokov are remarkably in tune with the images and tropes developed by Freud.
How are Holocaust events remembered and narrated, and why? What knowledge can Holocaust testimony convey? Christine June Wunderli explores these questions as she examines four works by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Guided by Bourdieu's theory of literary field as well as Young's theory of literary representation, she traces Hasidic influences in Wiesel's writing. Her conclusions are telling: Wiesel's narratives are born as memory is pulled towards both Auschwitz and the shtetl, caught up in the tension between the two. Still, the emerging trajectory is one of hope, led by a new categorical imperative.
As Lauris Edmond writes, du Fresne's work is a tapestry of the past and present, storying immigrant life. Flitting in and out of the past is shown to be one way of coming to terms with the present and of understanding the importance of home, as is evident in The Book of Ester and Frederique , both centering on the manifold, complex European cultural traditions that were often overlooked in settler countries. Another is to be an inquisitive spy on the land like the child narrator, Astrid Westergaard, in du Fresne's magnificent stories, many of them originally radio broadcasts, which depict life in a small Danish community in the Manawatu in the 1930's, often in a humorous and ironic manner. --
