This volume examines the contemporary African intellectual’s engagement with the State, the people, and hegemony. Featuring new and established voices, it explores the challenges of critiquing power and enacting change from within Africa or in exile.
The Déjà-vu and the Authentic
Viewing culture as a palimpsest, constantly rewritten, these essays explore the political and ethical stakes of creative reuse across literature, music, art, and cinema.
The Essays of Chitta Ranjan Das on Literature, Culture, and Society
The essays of Chitta Ranjan Das present a different vision of the post-colonial imagination. This book offers radical new pathways, breaking conventional boundaries between the periphery and the centre, literature and life, and East and West.
This book explores how Gabonese writer Sylvie Ntsame’s novels challenge patriarchal traditions that silence women. Ntsame counters racism and the objectification of the black female body with depictions of idealized interracial love, calling for understanding between cultures.
This book explores the figure of the female performer in 19th-century fiction, analyzing the clashing attitudes of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emile Zola. It examines women’s public roles as either a commitment to the feminist project or a mere exhibitionist demeanour.
The Female Voice in The Assembly of Ladies
This book examines gender relations in The Assembly of Ladies, a rare fifteenth-century poem told from a woman’s point of view. It shows how social and literary conventions impact women in the production and consumption of literature.
For Victorian and Modern women who defied convention, a diagnosis of madness was a constant threat. This book uncovers the reality of unjust institutionalization and reveals how these women actively protested their diagnoses and confinement.
This monograph presents a survey and evaluation of Cavafy’s poetical work with an emphasis on his historical and didactic poems, examining the relationship between his writing and Aristotle’s Poetics for the first time.
The Heroic Female
This re-reading of Vittorio Alfieri’s tragedies challenges traditional analyses that marginalize the female character. It argues that Alfieri undermines traditional gender roles, portraying his heroines as determined, active, and intelligent women.
The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs
The Homeric epics and the Book of Songs are not just the fountainheads of the Western and Chinese literary traditions; for centuries they played a central role in education and communal life. This title presents the first systematic comparison of the two corpora.
The House of Fiction as the House of Life
Houses, the silent background to our lives, could many a tale unfold. This collection offers a transdisciplinary look at the paper houses of 18th and 19th century English literature, investigating haunted edifices, gendered spaces, and Gothic fiction.
This volume engages with how the idea of the human features in African societies and scholarship. Contributors are concerned with the urgent imperative of rescuing what it means to be humane in a world being pushed towards a dystopic future by climate change and fundamentalism.
In a world turned upside-down, this essay collection shows the vital role of the humanities. It explores how societies have historically coped with distressing change to address today’s crises—from climate change and racism to the worldwide crisis of democracy.
The Italian Short Story through the Centuries
This collection of essays gathers together Italian and American scholars to provide a cooperative analysis of the Italian short story, beginning in the fourteenth century with Giovanni Boccaccio and arriving at the twentieth century with Alberto Moravia and Anna Maria Ortese.
In 1763, The Ladies Complete Letter-Writer was the first manual exclusively for women in eighteenth-century Britain. It questioned pre-conceived ideas on women and their writing. Unedited since 1765, it is now presented with a new introduction and notes.
The Life and Novels of Isabella St John
In the generation after Jane Austen, Isabella St John went further with her sharply satirical picture of the English upper class. Born an aristocrat, her novels use authentic inside knowledge to boldly tackle women’s rights and social injustice with humour and acute observation.
The Maghreb-Europe Paradigm
This book analyzes migration, gender, and identity for North African migrants in Europe. From sociological studies to literature, it debates notions of dispossession, cultural identity, and otherness, exploring the complex expressions of ‘exile’ and ‘pain’.
The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
Alban offers striking insights into the desires and frustrations of women through the narratives of impressive contemporary novelists. Crafting her analysis on the gaze as presented by Lacan and Sartre, she demonstrates how the subject creates her own ego against hostile others.
The Nordic Storyteller
Nineteen essays explore Nordic storytelling, from oral traditions like folklore and legend to the great literary works of authors like H. C. Andersen, Ibsen, and Isak Dinesen. The volume demonstrates the enduring power of narrative in Scandinavian life.
Moving beyond traditional themes of struggle and oppression, this book centres on playfulness, light and air in Irish literature and culture. Essays offer fresh readings of seminal authors like Yeats and Heaney, alongside lesser-known figures.