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Zhang Yimou is one of the most famous filmmakers of China, as well as one of the most controversial. Long the object of intense discussion and critique in China, Zhang s approach can express a highly stylized and crafted aesthetics, a documentary, daily-life feel, or a historically rich sense of tragedy and sometimes comedy. The director of some twenty feature films, Zhang also is known for other projects, including work as a cinematographer and actor, and directing the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As a prominent member of the pioneering Fifth Generation of film directors that began working after the Maoist period, Zhang s unique aesthetics garnered global attention. Several of Zhang Yimou s films have won domestic and international awards. Red Sorghum (1987) won the Golden Bear Award, Qiuju Goes to Court (1992) and Not One Less (1999) won the Golden Lion, To Live (1994) won the Grand Prix du Jury, and The Road Home (1999) won the Jury Grand Prix. To Live was banned in China, and Zhang as well as lead actress Gong Li was prevented from making films for two years. The debate that has centered on Zhang s films began right after Red Sorghum came out, and has continued to the present day. Critics branded his work as a self-Orientalizing fantasy that used the trope of a beautiful, vulnerable woman to suggest an inferior position for Chinese culture vis-a-vis the film s Western viewers. In some films notably Red Sorghum and Hero (2002), critics found an endorsement of authoritarian politics. These post-colonial and feminist critiques were countered by those who argued that the films broke through socialist isolation, for the first time finding for Chinese film a global audience. Others argued that the films were more subtle than critics recognized: embedded within them were complex inquiries into power, display, and authority. Despite his stature among Chinese film directors, Zhang Yimou has not yet been the subject of a book-length treatment in English. Film professors who teach his films only have access to a relatively small corpus of articles and book chapters published over some twenty-five years. This book is the first attempt to remedy that situation by laying out not simply a biographical or empirical study, but a polemical argument that counters some of the critical trends in the interpretation of Zhang s films. Taking advantage of the great interest in Zhang s work in China and the long-running debate, Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture uses a wide variety of sources, mainly in Chinese and English, to construct an alternative approach to understanding the films. The study zeroes in on nine feature films and the 2008 Beijing Olympics ceremonies, developing an analysis that both recognizes the formal aesthetic features of the films, while also contextualizing them within the culture debates of contemporary China. Theoretical approaches to the study of film and culture in the West also figure prominently. While finding common themes and structures that bring together several of Zhang s films, the study does not propose a unifying theory of Zhang s work as much as it uncovers connections between the films, showing a sharp, analytical approach at work. In this first critical study of films by Zhang Yimou in English, Wendy Larson plumbs the larger field of debate to suggest thought-provoking ways of thinking about the films and their relationship to Chinese culture. Arguing that the films do not appease Westerners but rather incorporate within themselves an understanding of how culture is changing under globalization, the book interprets the films emphasis on performance under coercion, the duplicity of display, and action under constraint. It investigates themes of gazing and being gazed upon, and behavior under duress, connecting these notions with implications on power, sovereignty, justice, and Chinese modernity. Larson argues that the films do not uncritically promote nationalism as some argue, but rather that they probe the possibilities for and limitations of culture in a globally-situated China. A substantial bibliography that provides references for the overall discussion is included. Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture is an important book for film scholars and for scholars of Chinese culture and history.

Tremendous changes have occurred in the field of education over the past generation as emerging technologies, especially the widespread adoption of the internet, have created new opportunities for teaching and learning. The tools and technologies employed in successful distance education ventures are now increasingly blended with traditional instructional formats, creating what is known as blended learning environments. However, these developments have not always been informed by sound instructional design theory. Despite a growing body of experimental and practical knowledge concerning the best teaching practices for blended learning contexts, there still remains a great need for prescriptive guidance to design blended learning environments. Instructional design theories can fill that gap. What are the best strategies for designing instruction for blended learning formats? Which instructional design theories are best suited to accomplish this task? This book proposes to offer some answers to these questions by identifying instructional design theories (i.e., sets of prescriptive strategies for designing instruction), selecting the most promising theory (Pennsylvania State University s Innovations in Distance Education or IDE), applying that theory to a blended learning environment, and using formative evaluation to improve the theory for future applications. Blended learning will continue to be a promising avenue for teaching and learning for the foreseeable future. Many university instructors are already using some aspect of an online or technology-mediated learning environment to supplement, enhance, or extend the traditional learning environment. It is only appropriate that instructional design strategies are provided to guide the development of these learning environments. This book is an attempt to address that need. This book highlights the positive learning outcomes that the IDE instructional design theory can generate for blended learning environments. For example, based on IDE prescriptions, blending learning environments should employ asynchronous discussions. In a small class, an instructor can reasonably participate in and review all discussions. But this work becomes exponentially more time-consuming with each student added to the roster. Asynchronous discussion technology can help an instructor accommodate larger class sizes without sacrificing attending to the individual in class discussions. Furthermore, learner participation in blended learning environments tends to be more substantial as students put more thought and research into their responses since they are not given at the spur of the moment. The IDE theory is valuable in providing specific strategies for designing sustained and extended learning environments. This finding has implications for humanities-based courses where instruction often touches upon issues that are controversial, complicated, or close to the heart for many students. The formative evaluation of the IDE theory demonstrates that blended learning environments can provide learners a sense of safety for exploring challenging topics. When students feel safe to explore new ideas in a non-threatening manner, they are more likely to learn and to grow. Blended learning environments, if one follows the IDE prescriptions, also provide opportunities for all learners to participate, not just those who might dominate a face-to-face classroom thereby intimidating other learners from fully participating. This book adds to the growing evidence that blended learning promises to be a significant step in the evolutionary process of great teaching and learning. It provides solid, straightforward guidance on building robust blended learning, and will be of interest to those in education, particularly instructors and designers of humanities-based college courses. It will also be of interest to instructional design theorists and practitioners seeking guidance in designing blended-learning environments.

Christina Stead (1902 1983) was an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterizations. Stead enjoyed an international reputation in the 1930s and beyond, then went out of favor as a communist-affiliated writer, until she was rediscovered by feminist critics. Her standing is considerable, and in Australia she vies with Patrick White for the laurel of finest Australian novelist. In this book, author Michael Ackland argues that the single most important influence on Stead s life, socialism, has been seriously neglected in studies of her life and work. Ackland delves into Stead s political formation prior to her departure for London in 1928, arguing that considerable insights can be added to the known record by reviewing these years within a specifically political context, as well as by interrogating Stead s own accounts of key persons and events. He examines her novels, from Seven Poor Men of Sydney to I m Dying Laughing and The Man Who Loved Children, and focuses on Stead s conception of history, of capitalist finance, and on the significance of the key historical moments that frame her works. In tracing the trajectory of her work, Ackland illuminates how Stead was, as a well-informed Marxist critic underscored, a product of thirties. Steeped in socialist literature and steeled to withstand ideological adversity, Stead emerged at the end of the decade a strongly committed novelist, whose intellectual idealism and convictions could, as coming decades would show, long withstand privation, heartbreaks and the unwelcome lessons of history. This is an important book for collections in Australian literature, comparative literature, world literature, and women's studies.

Thea Astley (1925-2004) was one of the outstanding Australian fiction writers of the 20th century. Four of her novels, including her last, Drylands (1999), won the prestigious Miles Franklin prize, and she was awarded numerous literary and civic honors during her lifetime. The distinctive appeal of her work comes from its unique sense of place, in tropical Queensland and the South Pacific, and from the mordant irony of her gaze on Australian society and her fiercely compassionate portrayal of social outsiders. Place and people reflect one another as Astley deals in climatic extremes both geographical and emotional: living on the edge of the cyclone , her people face the threat of personal annihilation with the frail weapons of irony, satire or anarchic humor. Despite the deeply Australian objects of her satire, Astley s innovative fictions have attracted critical attention beyond national boundaries, and her later work, especially, struck a chord with readers in North America. Astley felt strong affinities with a number of American writers, especially practitioners of shorter fiction like Hemingway, McCullers and Carver. Her work suggests comparison with that of William Faulkner, for the way it always inhabits the same imagined location. Place, and the parish of people who inhabit a particular place, are Astley s persistent subjects. Her landscapes, whether the luxuriant coast or the dry inland, become metaphors of the human failings that preoccupy her; and, as she deepened her interest in the history of these locations, Astley imbued her landscapes with a necessary political dimension. Astley s fiction challenged the realist tradition that had dominated Australian writing in the first half of the twentieth century. In the postwar literary world where she began to publish she was readily accorded a place among the Australian mid-century modernists like Randolph Stow and Patrick White, who was an admired early mentor. She was the only woman novelist of her generation to have won early success and published consistently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when the literary world was heavily male dominated. As a fiction writer she had few female contemporaries until the 1980s, when second wave feminism began to have a significant impact. Astley s choice of focal characters, and the objects of her satire, changed to reflect that impact. Always a writer who avoided solemnity and undercut her characters claims to heroism of any kind, she reveled in the new-found capacity to mock male pretension and assert female rebellion. This study of Astley s fiction explores her representation of place and power relations, and the innovative work of historicizing place. It also examines how her works reveal her fascination with outsiders, misfits, and failures, as well as her skepticism about heroes. The book also examines how Astley's works delve into decolonization and bring a multilayered postcolonial perspective on colonial race relations. The book takes the reader all the way to the latter part of Astley's writing career, which amply demonstrates her capacity to bring together a critical exploration of patriarchal power relations and a postcolonial perspective on race relations, as well as her satire on the worship of unbridled development which dominated Australian economic and social life during this period.

South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994, after about 350 years of minority governments. Nelson Mandela became the first President of a democratic or post-apartheid South Africa. The successive administrations since 1994 have pursued many programs, policies, legislative instruments and other initiatives to correct the imbalances that the apartheid system created. In particular, the focus, since 1994, has been on social and economic inclusion. Inclusive development is important for any democratic government emerging out of the past that was undemocratic and discriminatory. Redress becomes a hallmark of all that a democratic government pursues. The early years of a democratic or post-apartheid South Africa focused on national reconciliation. The second President, Thabo Mbeki, focused more on the economy a project he started when he was the first Deputy President in the Mandela administration. The third President of the democratic South Africa, Jacob Zuma, has continued with the project towards an inclusive society. In about twenty years since the dawn of democracy in South Africa the debates about the performance of the society under the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) has gained momentum. The ANC came up with many discussion documents aimed at informing policy and or ideological orientation of the state. In its national Congresses and General Councils meetings as well as in Makgotla, the ANC discusses and develops policies and frameworks which are to influence the work of the government. The analysis of the policies pursued since 1994, especially as far as inclusive development is concerned, is critical and it is the main preoccupation of this book. In addition, the book also examines the effects and implications of the policies implemented since 1994, in the context of whether South Africa is becoming or not becoming a society that was envisaged by the liberation project; an inclusive and prosperous nation. South Africa is a complex society in many respects. Many of intractable dilemmas confronting South Africa are a result of the legacy of apartheid. Apartheid created a skewed distribution of resources and opportunities. It is therefore not surprising that many challenges that the successive democratic administrations have had to deal with are structural; the structure of the economy make it more challenging to reduce poverty and inequality as well as to create jobs for the majority of South Africans. The book analyses the ramifications of the apartheid system examining the totality of apartheid colonialism in relation to the post-apartheid development experience within the context of the global distribution of power. The fundamental challenge that constrains South Africa s ability to further achieve inclusive growth and development relates to policy. Therefore, economic policy has to address the challenges of unemployment and poverty, as well as reducing inequality. Social policy has to be robust. Labor market policies should be ameliorated. More importantly, social and economic policies have to work together for socioeconomic development. To achieve this, South Africa needs a new consensus on the ideal framework or approach to its socioeconomic development. Over and above policy and or policy reforms, implementation should be improved. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, South Africa needs to reconfigure state-capital relations. Lastly, it should be more meaningful and relevant in the context of democratic South Africa to see a nation as a community that acknowledges and respects its repulsive political and economic history of deprivation through systematic restitution, reconciliation, and restructuring measures, and, more importantly, equitable sharing of resources. This is an important book for collections in African studies and international politics.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, Spain witnessed the rise of a liberal side that directly confronted the government during the First Carlist War (1833 1839), considered by many as the first civil war. After this conflict, many liberals felt the need to continue challenging the status quo, and to that end, they explored new concepts that originated beyond the borders of the Iberian nation. In many ways, they found their answer in the philosophical movement known as Krausism. Founded in Germany by Karl Christian Krause, introduced in Spain by Ruperto Navarro Zamorano in 1841, and expanded by Juli n Sanz del R o when he published Ideal de la Humanidad para toda la vida (1871), Krausism led to several important changes, including in politics. In fact, Krausism was considered to be driving force behind the Revolution of 1868, which brought the First Republic (1873 1874). However, Krausism also had great impact in other important fields, such as education and the arts. At a time when Spain s literacy rate bordered ninety percent, the need for a major overhaul in their education was a rare topic of agreement for liberals and conservatives. One of the most important educational centers that propelled those much-needed changes was the Instituci n Libre de Ense anza (ILE), a school founded under the influence of Krausism. This center paved the way for the foundation of future institutions, such as La Junta de Amplicaci n de Estudiantes. Continuing with ILE s ideology, this council launched various important schools, among them were La Residencia de Estudiantes and La Residencia de Se oritas. These two schools provided the ideal place for the development of the Spanish avant-garde. Equally important, Krausism brought to Spain the topic of aesthetics, which was introduced as a school subject by Sanz del Rio, and further explained by the founder of ILE, Francisco Giner de los R os, when he translated the works of Krause on the topic. These various introductions allowed men and women to explore new concepts in arts and display their talents. With the ever changing definition of Modernism, many Spanish critics continue to treat Spanish Modernismo as a different entity compared with the European version. This traditional approach in Modern Peninsular Literature and Cultural Studies has allowed for a generational division of literary and artistic production in Spain. These generations, encompassing over fifty years, follow a set of rigid outlines that have isolated specific writers according to their birth year, a historical event, and certain selected themes. This mindset enabled that method to set the standard in many studies and surveys, where the avant-garde otherwise known as vanguardismo has been considered part of the so-called Silver Age. However, recent investigations encourage a departure from this approach because it has not allowed new inquiries regarding the role of movements, places, and people during those years. This book responds to this call and offers an innovative approach to looking at various developments that occurred in Spain. By historicizing the emergence and impact of Krausism on the Spanish culture, this study answers questions such as: What made Spain the perfect place for the avant-garde? And, what events paved the way for the development of these movements? This is the first study that directly links Krausism to the Spanish avant-garde. To this end, the book is presented in chronological order in efforts to highlight how Krausism evolved and affected the culture of Spain. Those changes occurred in the fields of education, politics, philosophy, literature, and arts, to name a few. The effects in these fields allowed for artists and writers to challenge the tradition, embrace new ideas, and experiment with aesthetics, which all led to the Spanish avant-garde. Furthermore, this book will spark a debate in the wider audience and serve as a springboard, as well as a guide to new ways to analyze important cultural periods in Spain. To continue with the traditional approach would mean continuing to neglect the influence of ideologies, the importance of key playmakers, and the acceptance of obsolete paradigms as a norm. Krausism and the Spanish Avant-Garde is an important book for researchers, teachers, and students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, in the fields of cultural studies, Spanish avant-garde, philosophy, and education.

In recent years, Japanese manga, anime, music, cinema, television dramas, and computer games have gained many international fans. Recognizing the global appeal of Japanese popular culture, since the early 2000s the Japanese government has promoted popular culture exports and developed a national branding strategy using the slogan Cool Japan. In 2004, the large numbers of Japanese people who visited South Korea after watching the Korean television drama Winter Sonata caught the Japanese government s attention. In 2005, the government recognized in official documents for the first time that Japanese popular culture had another potential: to increase international visitor numbers to Japan and energize the domestic tourism industry. The term used in Japan to describe this form of tourism induced by popular culture is kontentsu tsurizumu, contents tourism. Contents tourism is defined as travel behavior motivated fully or partially by narratives, characters, locations, and other creative elements of popular culture forms, including film, television dramas, manga, anime, novels, and computer games. This book presents a comprehensive theoretical and historical overview of the phenomenon of contents tourism in Japan. Government, mass media, and scholarly interest in contents tourism is relatively new, and in its modern guise contents tourism behavior is closely associated with digital technology, the Internet, and social media. However, travel inspired by contents actually has a long history going back centuries. This book traces the development of contents tourism from its roots in religious pilgrimage and the earliest forms of poetry-inspired travel through to the most recent developments in anime location hunting and augmented reality gaming. In English-language scholarship, study of pop culture tourism has often focused on particular works or media formats. These approaches remain valid in many cases, but the theories and methods of film-induced tourism or literature tourism were never easily adapted into the Japanese setting. The rich history of derivative works, parodies, and multiuse of the same contents in a media mix enriched by the highly popular formats of anime and manga led Japanese scholars to seek a different approach to analyzing the links between popular culture and tourism. Scholars and those working in creative industries settled on the concept of contents, and focused on asking how and why particular creative elements resonated with fans and how fans interests in a narrative world whether fantasy, fictional, or even largely non-fictional could inspire travel to actual places, which came to be referred to as sacred sites by fans. In the twenty-first century, with culture industries worldwide now distributing and marketing their creative contents via multiple media platforms, the concept of contents and its links to tourism are of ever-increasing relevance to countries other than Japan. This book presents a vast range of works, artists and contents that have generated sacred sites across the length and breadth of Japan. Some sets of contents trigger tourism over only a short time period, while others have been inducing tourism for decades or even centuries. The comprehensive mapping of the phenomenon, both temporally and spatially, allows all past and present examples of contents tourism to be seen within a clear context. Furthermore, the book presents a detailed theoretical framework of how relationships are formed between and among the three main players of contents tourism: fans, contents businesses and local authorities. By doing so, it illuminates why some forms of contents tourism are simply localized flashes in the pan, while others go on to become embedded within the travel culture of the nation. Contents Tourism in Japan is a groundbreaking book in an important and rapidly emerging area of scholarly, media, political and business interest. It will be of interest primarily to scholars and practitioners with a specialization in tourism and media, but also to those studying contemporary popular culture in Japan and East Asia.

Chinese avant-garde fiction undoubtedly represents a summit in contemporary Chinese literature. Given the remarkable achievement of the genre and its revolutionary and profound impact on Chinese literature, it has attracted much attention from the English-speaking academic world. The existent scholarship on this subject, however, has some gaps which need to be filled. There are few book-length studies which provide a concentrated and in-depth analysis of Chinese avant-garde fiction as a literary genre; most studies tend to treat Chinese avant-garde fiction as a component of some grand cultural trends in the contemporary Chinese intellectual world. Such a sweeping historical approach overlooks the aesthetic and epistemological values of the fiction, preventing the researchers from investigating the thematic complexity and diversity and the artistic originality and appeal of the fiction. This book examines the works of three leading writers Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei and their significant contributions to the genre; this is the first in-depth, comparative study on these writers. This book examines how Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei manipulate dark moods and what Karl Jaspers termed limit-situations such as death and suffering, along with other motifs, to pursue both historicity and transcendent truth in their fiction. Setting the fiction against the backdrop of long history of Chinese culture and the development of modern Chinese literature, the book also explores the changing intellectual and literary landscape and the changing paradigms of literature in modern China. This study illuminates the patterns of history presented in the fiction of the three Chinese avant-garde writers as well as their respective views of history. The book also investigates another prominent theme in Chinese avant-garde fiction: the philosophical meditation on the human condition, human nature, and other metaphysical issues. This study also grapples with the mechanisms and devices adopted by these avant-garde writers to defamiliarize the Chineseness of their fiction. In so doing, the book attempts to answer the questions of why and how the reprise of traditional Chinese conventions and themes can be regarded as avant-garde in the Chinese context. The book also sheds light on each writer's aesthetics and the aesthetics of Chinese avant-garde fiction as a genre. Unlike most previous research on Chinese avant-garde fiction, the study focuses on the Chineseness of the fiction or its intertextuality with Chinese conventions and texts. This unique study will be a welcome addition to scholars of Chinese literature and cultural studies.

This study examines the earlier writings of celebrated Australian writer David Malouf, who was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award, and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. This book investigates his earlier writings to uncover what the terms poetic , poetic imagination and inner and outer ways imply for his development as a writer. Making use of some of his correspondence, diaries, and drafts of work-in-progress, Yvonne Smith takes into fuller account the way his works relate to each other and to the circumstances in which they were written. By investigating what poetic imagination might mean across the first decades when he was finding his way into a writer s vocation, this sturdy reaps fresh insights into the nature of David Malouf's creativity its tensions, struggles and moments of breakthrough, as well as its potential limitations. Finding what he could not do (or did not want to do) shapes strongly what he wants to achieve by the mid 1980s when his published works are becoming better known. Such considerations are touched on in earlier studies, yet have been sidelined by more recent criticism informed by postcolonial perspectives, debates about myths of origins and other Australian nation-based agendas. That Malouf has played a part, not only as a writer but as a public intellectual, in what Brigid Rooney terms his consistent cultivation of nation adds to this trajectory in his literary career. However, there has been less attention to Malouf s development as a writer its transnational dimensions, for instance, as he finds his vocation through hybrid family cultures and living for many years between Australia and Europe. It is helpful that discussion is increasingly balanced by broader views of what Australian literature might encompass, of global connections in worlds within national narratives, together with consideration of notions of world literature and a fluid transnation that exceeds boundaries of the state.

Hou Hsiao-hsien is one of the most beloved auteur film directors active today. His films are among the most important to have been produced worldwide in the past thirty years. His work has garnered more than a dozen awards, including prizes at The Venice Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and the Cannes Film Festival. Critics lavish praise on Hou s films, which have won over a dozen major awards worldwide. His breakout film A Time to Live, A Time to Die earned the Fipresci Award at Berlin in 1986 as well as the Special Jury Prize at Torino. Hou won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1989 for A City of Sadness, the first bold public expression of the 1947 February 28th Massacre in Taiwan. His uniquely crafted biopic The Puppetmasterreceived the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1993. He has garnered various additional honors at film festivals in Nantes, Locarno, Rotterdam, Singapore, and elsewhere. Hou s oeuvre has attracted the attention of a wide range of critics, scholars, and film aficionados. His work is technically pioneering, particularly for its signature approach to realism. His subtle interrogation of the aesthetics of Hollywood places him in a category with such greats as Satayajit Ray, Kitano Takeshi, Wong Kar-wai, Abbas Kiarostami, and Werner Herzog. His ability to capture and visualize such elusive phenomena as feelings of malaise, ambivalence and aimlessness in a world in which teleology is the only tolerable cultural logic, his elevation of the insignificant minutiae of daily life to objects of aesthetic sublime, his interrogation of cultural cohesion through the use of multiple languages and symbolic valences compels the serious student of cinema to study his work carefully. Christopher Lupke s book is a comprehensive treatment of Hou Hsiao-hsien s entire oeuvre, including The Assassin. Lupke was able to visit the set of The Assassin and includes rare photos of Hou on his film set. In addition to a detailed filmography and a substantial bibliography, the book also several interviews of Hou Hsiao-hsien that Lupke has translated into English. This book is a must read for all interested in global cinema today. It also provides important information for those interested in the society and politics of postwar Taiwan and Sinophone culture in general. It will appeal to readers concerned with issues such as the representation of ethnicity, gender, political repression, and the tensions between cities and the countryside. Anyone who wishes to understand radical innovation in contemporary world cinema must come to terms with the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Read excerpts from the book Author Interview with Christopher Lupke

This book examines the political meanings of Tony Harrison s imaginative works and offers a reassessment of the poet s political character. While Harrison s class political analysis has been central to much of the discussion of his poetry, his concern with colonialism still generates relatively little commentary. The nature of his republicanism and its importance for his poetry has been neglected, while his humanism tends to be seen as at odds with his politics. This study discusses Harrison s concern with internal colonialism in the United Kingdom and internationalist anti-colonial poetic. It witnesses the radical political inclusiveness of his humanism and his giving the dispossessed a voice in his high cultural poetry. Particular attention is accorded to his ambiguous identification with John Milton as a great republican poet, his location of Milton and himself in a radical republican literary lineage, and his wider excavation of that lineage. It also illuminates Harrison s unnoticed elective affinity with Arthur Rimbaud as a regional poet with the wrong accent, as a hoodlum poet who fell silent and became an explorer and fortune-seeker in Africa, as a white n gre , and as the great outsider now f ted as a high cultural poet. Harrison s political convictions and loyalties will be shown to be consistent in the different historical, literary, and social contexts that the poems take as their subjects, or that are opened up by their allusive fields. The book will newly establish that the creative dialectical interplay between the class, anti-colonial, and radical republican and humanist aspects of the poetry, and his literary elective affinities, are essential for understanding the aesthetics and the politics of the Rimbaud of Leeds.

In recent years, Sinophone studies has introduced to a broader audience multiple ways of examining Chineseness beyond the traditional China-centered view. Whereas a Sinophone product, whether fiction or film, reflects on the close relationship between language and place, a localist agenda from the margins of China and Chineseness is brought to the fore. It is important to consider that Sinophone literature both embodies an attachment to cultural China and encompasses vital issues of ethnicity and politics with respect to local contexts. To be more precise, Sinophone literature points to constantly evolving changes and adaptations into a profound combination of Chineseness and local identities. Surprisingly, there is no scholarly monograph focusing on the literary production in Sinophone Taiwan so far, even though Taiwan is defined by Shu-mei Shih as a major site of Sinophone literature as a result of its serial and layered colonial condition. What does then Sinophone Taiwan mean? According to Shu-mei Shih, The Sinophone Taiwan, for instance, is only an aspect of Taiwan s multilingual community where aboriginal languages are also spoken, and postmartial law Taiwan cultural discourse is very much about articulating symbolic farewells to China. In other words, Sinophone Taiwan is loaded with an ambivalent attitude towards the Chinese state as well as concept of cultural China while drawing on exclusively localized experiences. This first scholarly monograph focusing on the literary and cultural geography of Taiwan through a Sinophone lens is therefore a step toward filling the gap. While reexamining the cultural and political complexities of Sinophone Taiwan, this book also recognizes the narrative of the strange as a widely adopted artistic form in highlighting Sinophone practices and experiences separated from the China-centric ideology. The study argues that the narratives of the strange in Sinophone Taiwan cross the boundaries between the living and the dead as well as the past and the present, in response to a pastiche of phantasm, Chinese diaspora, gender discourse, and transnational politics. With detailed analysis, this book brings into focus the notion of zhiguai historiography in an attempt to shed light on the Sinophone narratives of the strange and to demonstrate how the topic can help illuminate the social and political implications of literary texts beyond contemporary China. By analyzing the literary tropes of strangeness, this research deals with the critical issues of the cultural exchange between China, Taiwan, and Sinophone Malaysia. The book explores the idea of the strange narrative as a fluid, border-crossing phenomenon that is impossible to ignore in Chinese ethnic writing. In this light, the narrative of the strange refers to the storytelling wedded to the motifs of ghost haunting and/or the figurative manifestation of anomalies. In recounting diverse cultural spectacles of the strange, this book builds on such topics as the ghostly Chineseness, lingering aboriginal spirits, and eccentric identities with respect to ethnic and sexual complexities. Therefore, narratives of the strange are examined from three interrelated perspectives in this book. First, spectral and monstrous appearances can be associated either with a nostalgic attachment to the past or with an emotional resistance against historical traumas. Second, the scope of the strange can be expanded to bring into play the figuration of the ghostly/monstrous together with the magical representation of uncanniness, wonder, and fantasy. Third, strange figures can be posited as the invisible, marginalized subjects like sexual and ethnic minorities within a dominant social framework. Intriguingly, the equation can also be inverted by creative writers to make strange figures voiced and visible in a political light. Collectively, the scope of the strange includes the hauntology, the ghostly, the monstrous, the uncanny, the magical, and the fantastic. Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond will be of interest to scholars and students in Asian studies, particularly Sinophone studies as well as Chinese literature and culture.

This book examines the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories of the dictatorship in the aftermath of the two first decades since the Uruguayan dictatorship of 1973 1984 in the broader context of public policies of denial and institutionalized impunity. Transitional justice studies have tended to focus on countries like Argentina or Chile in the Southern Cone of Latin America. However, not much research has been conducted on the silent cases of transitions as a result of negotiated pacts. The literature on memory trauma and impunity has much to offer to studies of transition and post-authoritarianism. This book situates the human and cultural experience of state terrorism from the perspective of the experiences of Uruguayan families, through an in-depth ethnographic, cultural, psycho-social, and political interdisciplinary study. While there has been much discussion about memory and the politics of memory, little attention has been paid to the transmission of memory itself across generations and to the study of the intersection between memory, silencing, politics of oblivion, and impunity. This book helps to fill the gap by examining the transmission of memory across two generations of the dictatorship (adults and children who experienced the effects of state terrorism firsthand) against the background of the transitional politics of oblivion and the legacy of the harmful legacy of the dictatorship reinforced by a continued public politics of silencing and impunity. Problems of institutionalized impunity and oblivion are more common than is documented in the current available transitional justice literature. The book looks at the private transmission of memories through narrative and embodied modes of transmission across generations against the backdrop of Uruguay s public paths of remembering within the environment created by a transitional politics of public denial, silencing and oblivion (1984 2000) that led to institutionalized impunity and, over time, to the emergence of a new climate of public waves of memory towards truth seeking and accountability that have become increasingly stronger over the last decade (2004 2014). This book brings to light the paradoxical problem of collective remembering and transmission of traumatic political experience in the political context of a consensus that is shrouded by secrecy and impunity. There is growing interest in post-transitional processes which, decades after the initial transition, have become a highly contested issue reignited both within and outside Latin America where when the there is a shift away from oblivion and impunity toward contestation. Uruguay is a classic example of this after more than forty years since the dictatorship, families and civil society at large are seeking redress and accountability, in spite of the blanket amnesty and political and social amnesia. While the interest in the fields of memory, oral transmission, and transitional justice studies continues to grow, there is dearth of recently published high-quality works in English on post-authoritarian Uruguay, generations, and memory transmissions. This study takes an innovative and unique approach of studying memory transmissions intersubjectively, in its intertwining of sociocultural, political and psycho-social dimensions as it draws from private experiences in families to illuminate the public and political processing of memory in this idiosyncratic case. The book also adds to the scarce collection of studies of Uruguay, a country which followed its own sinous path from denial and impunity towards truth, memory, and accountability. State Terrorism and the Politics of Memory in Latin America will be a valuable resource to students, scholars, and practitioners who are interested in substantive questions of memory, democratization, and transitional justice, set in Uruguay s scenario, as well as to human rights policy-makers, advocates and educators and social and political scientists, cultural analysts, politicians, social psychologists, psychotherapists, and activists. It will also appeal to the general public who are interested in the problem of how to transmit the stories and meaning of traumatic experiences as a result of gross human rights violations, the cultural and generational effects of state terror, and the politics of impunity. This book is essential for collections in Latin American studies, political science, and sociology. See excerpts.

This book is part of the Cambria Australian Literature Series headed by Susan Lever (Australian National University). This collection is a collaborative cross-racial project that brings Anne Brewster, a white scholar of Aboriginal literature, into conversation with Aboriginal writers about a range of issues that arise directly from their work. Brewster explores the various contexts in which these writers write and in which non-Aboriginal readers read Aboriginal literature. The interviews are accompanied by a survey essay (by Brewster) on each writer s work which aims to introduce readers to the main themes and issues of each writer. The book represents a range of writers. It includes highly acclaimed writers whose works are widely recognised (Kim Scott, Doris Pilkington Garimara, Melissa Lucashenko) and other writers whose works are on the ascendancy (Romaine Moreton and Jeanine Leane). Leane and Moreton have attracted some scholarly attention - for example by being set on educational syllabi and having scholarly work published on it and their reputation continues to grow nationally and internationally. The book includes interviews with a number of emerging writers whose work is powerful and compelling but has not yet been taken up widely either because it is new (Marie Munkara) or because there has been a lack of confidence on the part of readers in taking up authors outside the present canon (Alf Taylor). The interviews make a unique contribution to the understanding of Aboriginal literature and of how these writers developed as writers. While many Aboriginal writers write in part for their own communities, they have expressed their strong desire that their work circulate widely among non-indigenous audiences. This book will facilitate the dissemination of Aboriginal literature and will make use of the valuable literary and cultural resources of the writers themselves in order to enrich and expand the understanding of that literature. In these interviews the writers talk about the development of Australian indigenous literature and the conditions which have given rise to their writing. They talk about their childhoods, family histories and the regions in which they have lived. They talk about their education and the books they have read; about the importance of humour, the reasons for their choice of a particular genre and what aesthetic and cultural work they see it as undertaking. They talk about how they conceive of their audiences and issues pertaining to cross-racial scholarship. These are all issues which allow readers to understand their work better. This understanding is further enhanced by the survey essays on each writer s work. Aboriginal literature is a growing field with a rapidly expanding global audience. Unfortunately many students and scholars read only the most recognised and acclaimed writers and betray some hesitation in approaching newer authors. While this book represents three widely recognised writers, it widens the canon of Aboriginal literature by introducing readers to four lesser-known but equally important writers. Non-indigenous readers are sometimes unsure about the ethics of cross-racial reading and research - how to approach Aboriginal literature, how to read it, teach it and write about it. By providing rare and valuable insight into the writers creative process, into the ways in which they conceive of their audiences and readerships, and into their aspirations for cross-racial understanding, the interviews clarify uncertainties and provide direction for non-Aboriginal readers. They contribute to widespread discussions about the ethics of cross-racial reading, research and scholarship. They provide a timely addition to cultural debates within the public sphere beyond the academy and enable us to better comprehend the turbulent times in which we live. This book serves to broaden and deepen current scholarship on the literary works but also to introduce readers to writers they might not have read before. They are both accessible and scholarly. The book also fills a gap by focusing areas of that has been neglected. For example while Lucashenko s novel Steam Pigs has attracted a lot of critical attention, her second adult novel Hard Yards remains largely unnoticed, a situation this book aims to correct. Giving this Country a Memory is an important book for all literature and Australasian collections and well as those of global Indigenous literature.

Poets writing in Spanish by the end of the twentieth century had to contend with globalization as a backdrop for their literary production. They could embrace it, ignore it or potentially re-imagine the role of the poet altogether. This book examines some of the efforts of Spanish-language poets to cope with the globalizing cultural economy of the late twentieth century. This study looks at the similarities and differences in both text and context of poets, some major and some minor, writing in Chile, Mexico, the Mexican American community and Spain. These poets write in a variety of styles, from highly experimental approaches to poetry to more traditional methods of writing. Included in this study are Chileans Ra l Zurita and Cecilia Vicu a, Spaniards Leopoldo Mar a Panero and Luis Garc a Montero, Mexicans Silvia Tomasa Rivera and Guillermo G mez Pe a, and Mexican American U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Some of them embrace (and are even embraced by) media both old and new whereas others eschew it. Some continue their work in the vein of national traditions while others become difficult to situate within any one single national tradition. Exploring the varieties of strategies these writers employ, this book makes it clear that Spanish-language poets have not been exempt from the process of globalization. Individually, these poets have been studied to varying degrees. Globalization has been studied extensively from a variety of disciplinary approaches, particularly in the context of the Latin American region and Spain. However, it is a relative rarity to see poets being studied, as they are in this work, in terms of their relationship to globalization. Taken as a sample or snapshot of writing tendencies in Latin American and Spanish poetry of the late twentieth century, this book studies them as part of a greater circuit of cultural production by establishing their literary as well as extra-literary genealogies and connections. It situates these poets in terms of their writing itself as well as in terms of their literary traditions, their methods of contending with neoliberal economic models and global information flows from the television and Internet. Although many literary critics attempt to study the connections and relationships between poetry and the world beyond the page, few monographs go about it the way this one does. It takes a transatlantic approach to contemporary Spanish-language poetry, focusing on poets on poets from Spain and the American continent, emphasizing their connections, commonalities and differences across increasingly porous borders in the age of information. The relationship between text and context is explored with a cultural studies approach, more often associated with media studies than with literary studies. Literature is not treated as a privileged object of isolated study, but rather as a system of ideas and images that is deeply interwoven with other forms of human expression that have arisen in the last decades of the twentieth century. The result is a suggestive analysis of the figure of the poet in the broader globalized marketplace of cultural goods and ideas. Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age is an important book for library collections in Spanish, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Chicano Studies.

On September 11, 1973, a right-wing coup overthrew Chile s democratically elected, socialist President Salvador Allende and established an eighteen-year dictatorship. The new government exiled, imprisoned, tortured, and killed Allende supporters. In addition to targeting leftist politicians and labor organizers, the new government took aim at the nueva canci n ( new song ) movement. It banned this style of folk-based music, exiled many nueva canci n musicians, and brutally executed V ctor Jara, the movement s most prominent figure. Meanwhile, supporters of the coup celebrated Allende s overthrow by blasting m sica t pica, a different style of folk-based music, into the streets. The intensity with which Chilean rightists and leftists each came to embrace and attack different styles of folk-based music was the outcome of a historical process in which competing notions of Chilean identity became intertwined with the political divisions of the Cold War era. To date, scholars have paid little attention to the role that music played at political rallies and protests, the political activism of right-wing and left-wing musicians, and the emergence of musical performances as sites of verbal and physical confrontations between Allende supporters and the opposition. This book illuminates a largely unexplored facet of the Cold War era in Latin America by examining linkages among music, politics, and the development of extreme political violence. It traces the development of folk-based popular music against the backdrop of Chile s social and political history, explaining how music played a fundamental role in a national conflict that grew out of deep cultural divisions. Through a combination of textual and musical analysis, archival research, and oral histories, Mularski demonstrates that Chilean rightists came to embrace a national identity rooted in Chile s central valley and its huaso ( cowboy ) traditions, which groups of well-groomed, singing huasos expressed and propagated through m sica t pica. In contrast, leftists came to embrace an identity that drew on musical traditions from Chile s outlying regions and other Latin American countries, which they expressed and propagated through nueva canci n. Conflicts over these notions of Chilenidad ( Chileanness ) both reflected and contributed to the political polarization of Chilean society, sparking violent confrontations at musical performances and political events during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Recent studies of diplomatic and military history have shown that the Cold War in Latin America was a multifaceted contest between various regional proponents of communism and capitalism. This book adds to this new conceptualization of Latin America s Cold War era by extending it to musical culture as well. It examines the manner by which the Chilean right attempted to undermine nueva canci n music, and it disproves common perceptions that the right had no culture of its own by revealing that rightists labored passionately to protect and advance their own style of folk-based music. It also examines how the Allende government and nueva canci n musicians worked officially and unofficially to expand their musical influence and provide cultural assistance to other Latin America countries. By analyzing the development of such endeavors by the right and left, Mularski reveals through the lens of music how national and transnational perspectives shaped social relationships and political conflict among rightists and leftists in Chile. This book contributes a more nuanced conception of music, politics, and cultural nationalism. Most existing research on the cultural components of anti-imperialist movements links nationalist political and economic policies with expressions of cultural nationalism, such as folk revivals, generally asserting that these folk revivals convey nationalist and anti-imperialist perspectives by celebrating traditions of local origin rather than foreign cultural influences. Mularski demonstrates how complex local dynamics complicate the prevailing association of cultural nationalism and anti-imperialism: right-wing Chileans embraced the folk-based m sica t pica style while at the same time crusading against the political and economic efforts of anti-imperialists, and Chilean leftists condemned imperialism while expressing a cultural identity rooted in nueva canci n that was simultaneously both nationalist and transnational. In doing so, Mularski offers a powerful example and multifaceted understanding of the fundamental role that music often plays in shaping the contours of political struggles and conflicts throughout the world. Music, Politics, and Nationalism in Latin American is an important book for Latin American studies, history, musicology/ethnomusicology, and communication.

This book is in the Cambria Latin American Literatures and Cultures Series headed by Rom n de la Campa, the Edwin B. and Lenore R. Williams Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. This book analyzes the relation between cultural changes and experimental fiction written during the 1920s and 30s. This era, known in Latin America as the historical avant-garde, was characterized by a wave of literary and artistic innovation. By framing several Central American novels and short stories from this period within the highly dynamic political and intellectual cultures from which they emerge, this study analyzes the way in which novelists Miguel ngel Asturias, Luis Cardoza y Arag n, Flavio Herrera, Rogelio Sin n, and Max Jim nez employ subversive narrative strategies that undermine previously dominant intellectual paradigms. This study demonstrates how these writers undermine the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and naturalism through a variety of experimental narrative techniques while simultaneously rejecting the discourse of positivism. This had significant social implications given that positivism the notion that true knowledge could only be obtained through observable scientific data was abused by Latin American military dictators during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a means of oppressing indigenous groups and working-class citizens under the guise of social progress. This book thus argues that the use of experimental narrative strategies in these novels is not merely for the sake of artistic innovation, but, rather, that these literary works manifest a desire for modernization through social and cultural change. The study concludes by pointing to the undeniable influence that these authors have had on the trajectory of contemporary Central American fiction. The Central American works analyzed in this study are significant contributions to the Latin American avant-garde, but have been overlooked for two reasons. First, until recently, the main focus of critics of the Latin American avant-garde has been on poetry and manifestos rather than fiction. Second, there has traditionally been a general lack of attention in Latin American literary criticism to the Central American region as a whole. Central American avant-garde fiction is therefore a field that has been dually marginalized by literary critics who have tended to focus on works of other genres by authors from countries with major metropolitan centers and well-established literary circles. Merlon H. Forster and David K. Jackson, authors of Vanguardism in Latin American Literature, have described research on the Central American avant-garde as sketchy, noting that much more careful work is needed. This book thus responds to a real need within Latin American literary criticism by addressing an area of research that, because of being overlooked, remains only partially understood. By identifying innovative Central American texts and demonstrating the ways in which they participate in the broader Latin American avant-garde movement, this study contributes to a more complete picture of this continental project of cultural renovation. The author challenges scholars to rethink the concept of the avant-garde as solely a group phenomenon, and establishes a direct link between literary experimentation and the cultural contexts of these Central American countries. This study contributes to recent scholarship that has emphasized the importance of this brief period of radical experimentation in the development of subsequent literary movements in Latin America and contributes to the ongoing dialogue in the humanities about the concept of modernity in relation to various forms of cultural representation. Central American Avant-Garde Narrative is an important book for all literature, Spanish, and Latin American studies collections.

Literature on Zimbabwe s modern history is influenced by one particular perspective concerning the historical roots of inequitable land distribution choreographed by British colonialism from 1890. This dominant theme is based on the imperatives of redressing a historical injustice where British people alienated prime land from, among others, the indigenous Shona, Ndebele, and Tonga. The key element in this perspective has been the science of land management, particularly the protection of wooded areas, the soil, and wildlife. The discourse of ecological calamity stresses the damaging outcomes from unregulated timber logging, agriculture, mining and hunting, as well as the threats of degradation and the need to control methods of resource exploitation by humans. This book examines the debates and processes on woodland exploitation in Zimbabwe during the colonial era (1890 1960). It explores the social, economic, and political contexts of perceptions on woodland distribution and management. Much of the period was characterized by both local and global debates about environmental problems, generating in their wake politically charged and emotive language about the consequences deforestation, soil erosion, and threats to wildlife. This study analyses the history of exploitation and conservation of the Zimbabwean teak (mkusi or Baikiea plurijuga) and its associated species in Northwestern Matabeleland from 1890 to 1960. Timber exploitation was among the top three colonial economic activities in Matabeleland, including ranching and tobacco cultivation. Concessionaire capitalists and forestry officials dominated the exploitation and conservation of the Zambezi teak woodland or gusu, respectively. On one hand, capitalists sought to extract as much commercial hardwood timber as they could while on the other hand, foresters restricted tree felling. This study shows that there was conflict and accommodation between the two interest groups involved regarding exploitation and conservation. Conflict arose when timber firms such as the Rhodesia Native Timber Concessionaires (RNTC) demanded an increase on the quantity of important trees cut every year while foresters put pressure for minimum exploitation. Reconciling the two stakeholders was difficult, and from time to time they either clashed or accommodated each other through dialogue, persuasion, and compromise. The two dominant players on the scene were the Forestry Service and the RNTC. Such conflict and accommodation also took place between foresters and Africans. Foresters and other government officials blamed African methods of farming and food gathering for causing destruction on gusu. But foresters depended on ultra-cheap African tenant labor in the practice of conservation, which in large part involved firefighting and prevention. A major stumbling block for the Forestry Service in conserving gusu against African and settler demands was the absence of a Forest Act in 60 out of the 70 years of history examined. A Forest Act was enacted in 1949. In these seventy years, 994,000 and 963,000 acres were exploited and conserved for future purposes respectively. In this first critical work on the topic, author Vimbai Kwashirai focuses on woodland conservation and commercial development in Zimbabwe during the colonial period. Emphasis is placed on the tensions, conflicts, and sometimes the collusions between timber companies and the developing state. This book provides a rich example of Green Imperialism along the lines of Richard Grove, but goes beyond that by giving an economic historical account that situates conservation history within the broader political-economic context. This book is based on broad archival research, and it traces the relationship between conservation and the development of commercial capital from forest enterprises in colonial Zimbabwe. It delivers much insight on the conflicts and tensions of the workings of the British South Africa Company (a capitalist enterprise that was at the same time overseeing the development of a state polity of the then Rhodesia), providing evidence for a strong argument for the development of industrial capital under colonialism. The forestry service was caught in these tensions of supporting and enterprise, but also trying to regulate that green capital and establish the beginnings of protected forests in Zimbabwe. This book casts much light on the environmental impact on a part of Africa caused by the push and pull of politics and economics. This book will be an important addition to collections in African studies, environmental studies, and political science.

Pat Barker is one of the most compelling of the current generation of British novelists, especially in her use of the novel as an instrument of social critique, fashioning a literature which does not shy away from asking thorny questions, refusing the doctrinaire of what goes without saying, suspicious of simple answers. To date she has published eleven novels, some of which have been adapted for stage and screen. Barker s Regeneration trilogy was highly acclaimed, the second volume The Eye in the Door (1993), won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the third, The Ghost Road (1995), was awarded the Booker Prize. Other accolades include the Fawcett Society Book Prize for Union Street (1982), the 1996 Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award, and in 2000, Barker was named Commander of the British Empire. While Barker has been variously categorized as a regional, realist, feminist or war writer, her concern with the complexity of human reality sets her apart from many of her contemporaries, resisting as she does the temptation to romanticize working-class life or wartime experience. Barker s prostitutes are also wives, mothers, and friends, while her soldiers are often afraid, even hysterical, sometimes homosexual; formulaic, black-and-white categories disintegrate in Barker s hands. While Barker s work has been approached through several critical lenses, feminist and psychoanalytic among them, this study proposes examining Barker s novels from the angle of the social representations theory (especially as elucidated by Serge Moscovici), since social representations are the condition of the ongoing discourse which defines and maintains human reality as members of a group. Through time, social representations become reified, and their normative, prescriptive role develops into the natural order of things. Conversely, social representations can be deployed to challenge dominant ideologies, to expose the irrational fa ade of human reality, to seek something resembling truth. It is this dilemma of social representations, how they are used and abused and to what purpose, that Barker explores so deeply. This theoretical approach seems especially adapted to Barker s work, given her obvious concern with the articulation between the mediated foundation of contemporary human society, and our collective difficulty in representing genuine human experiences which elude easy representation. In this critical study, David Waterman examines questions of social representation in all of Pat Barker s novels, published over the last twenty-five years, from Union Street (1982) to the recent Life Class (2007), especially the ways in which Barker encourages us to interrogate the reality created by such conventionalizing, prescriptive representations in favor of a reality more accurately represented through a critical assessment of the uses and abuses of collective representations. Barker s principal characters are out of step with the natural order of things; they question cultural constructions like masculinity, heroism, the unquestionable right of institutions, and they worry about their role as members of the larger community. Such questions are often, fundamentally, questions of representation, whether we examine how existing representations serve to maintain the status quo, or whether we are interested in how to represent the horrors of war or the atrocities of civil life, how to give voice to trauma in an effort to approach something resembling truth in other words, how best to represent the kinds of human experiences which resist representation. Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality is an important book for scholars interested in contemporary British fiction, women s writing, and social-psychological approaches to literature.

The garments and textiles sector is one of the oldest export industries and has often served as the starter industry for many countries, especially in Asia. To quell the fear of job losses to countries in the global South, northern countries established the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA) in 1974. This arrangement restricted garment and textile imports to the United States, Canada, and the European Union (EU) by allocating quotas to countries throughout the developing world. The MFA, in place after more than thirty years, was finally phased out in 2005. Most studies conducted prior to the 2005 quota phase out predicted that once the quotas were lifted, many of the smaller countries would drastically lose market share. The prime reason for this pessimism was the notion that the various stakeholders would never be able to work together to make the necessary changes needed for the sector. The subtext was that these groups would be too focused on their own interests and would not want to compromise their intimate relationship with powerful players in the industry. In contrast to the conventional wisdom of that time, many of the unexpected countries like Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka not only survived the end of the MFA, but they have made significant improvements which have allowed them to maintain their foothold in the international trading regime. The general perception of the garment and textile industry in the global South is fueled only by images of dismal labor conditions and unsuitable factories, descriptions of labor clashes with police, and analyses of low wages and exploitative multinational corporations. This book presents an insightful perspective on the garment and textiles industries in Asia by highlighting that an industry fraught with competing concerns can, in fact, collaborate and work together when it is in the interest of both the state and interest groups to do so. This comparative study recognizes the role of both the state and interest groups in the policy making process and argues that they are interlinked and require one another for sustainable reforms. Employing original, in-depth research in three different countries, the study skillfully delves down deep beyond the macro statistics and commonly held images to cast light on some of the significant policy and attitudinal shifts that have occurred in this industry. It demonstrates that even though the struggle continues, it is important to recognize the improvements thus far and to work towards positive change. This book also takes a much larger historical view of the sector, arguing that manipulation of the trading regime has created and continues to create both incentives and disincentives for the various stakeholders involved in this industry. By analyzing the garment sector through the lens of domestic coalitions, Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka: The Labor Behind the Global Garments and Textiles Industries presents new and innovative ways of conceptualizing the garment and textiles industries that include the possibility for change and resistance from a vantage point of cooperation among key groups, rather than only contention. The book utilizes the established policy networks framework, which has traditionally only been applied to the United States and European nations, but expertly adapts it to countries in the global South. Saxena s domestic coalitions approach, which can be thought of as a precursor to a full policy network, differs from the policy network approach in crucial ways by highlighting the importance of other actors or facilitators in the network, recognizing that interactions among stakeholders are just as important as interactions between groups and the state, as well as the incentives associated with expanding the existing coalition. Saxena has conducted more than a hundred interviews with key informants, several focus groups with eighty-five garment factory workers, as well as quantitative surveys of a hundred garment workers in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka to establish several important insights about this early stage of domestic coalitions in these countries. First, the changing role of labor marked by its entrance into the coalition is itself significant in these countries where the network has been historically shut out to labor groups. Second, the study demonstrates that various types of channels and mechanisms, both institutionalized and non-institutionalized, are essential to ensure the representation of labor groups and their influence on policy change in the industry. Third, the book expertly delinks the concepts of improved labor conditions and worker empowerment, by arguing that one should not assume that better labor conditions automatically translate into an empowered workforce. Finally, Saxena comes to a critical conclusion that change and improvements stemming from top-down programs, though they may be initially effective in improving basic standards, do not help in furthering coalitions with labor groups and institutionalizing their role in policy making. This study puts the entire sector into the larger context of international trade policy; effects of decades of import quotas set the context at the beginning of the book while current trade policies impacting the garment sector, are discussed at the end. Saxena convincingly argues that the sector and the incentives of those who depend on it cannot be understood without this larger context in which the sector has flourished and ultimately survived, and all of these elements combined are essential to understanding the complexities of the garment and textile industries. Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka is essential for students and researchers in policy studies, labor studies, South and Southeast Asian studies, international trade, and political science, as well as those engaged in program design and evaluation of projects focused on labor rights. This study is also critical for non-governmental organizations with a thematic focus on the garments and textiles industry, labor rights, human rights, and international trade policy, as well as for private sector organizations focused on improving labor conditions around the world. Watch Dr. Sanchita Saxena speak about the book!

This study is a thorough examination of the entire historical scope of the Chinese Buddhist bibliography, including its historical foundations, textual classifications, criteria of authenticity, and collections made by individual catalogers. The need for such a study is urgent, for although references to and even in-depth studies of individual Buddhist catalogs and the data they contain have been written, there has not been until now an investigation into the entire historical scope of Buddhist bibliography in China. Understanding just what those who organized the canon over the centuries have left out, or preserved, is key to recovering a fuller appreciation for the development of Buddhism in East Asia in all its complexity. The study of individual bibliographers positions is equally crucial for the understanding of standards of authenticity and assignment of value to one group of scriptures over others. History of books, libraries, and learning in China would be incomplete without studying the history of Buddhist bibliography. Ultimately, it is necessary to study Buddhist bibliography because it represents the Tripitaka, the largest and most influential collection of sacred scriptures in the world, and because this collection needs to be incorporated into comparative discussions of Scripture and Canon in world history. This is the first study that covers the entire historical scope of Buddhist bibliography in China in any European language, as well as the only study that provides detailed descriptions of all influential catalogs of the Buddhist canon written in the second through the end of the tenth centuries. It is the first attempt, in both European and Asian languages, to provide a comparative analysis between ideas, and these theological and historiographical principles used in creation of an authoritative canon by Christian and Buddhist scholars. The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka is an important book for Asian studies, history of classifications, textual criticism, history of books, and history of libraries. This book would be appropriate for courses in Chinese Buddhism, Chinese history, and Chinese literature and civilizations. It will also be an excellent supplemental textbook for courses in comparative religious studies and comparative religious scripture. Watch Dr. Tanya Storch speak about the book!

Motherhood and maternal relationships abound in much literature by Chicana writers, even when these themes appear to be minor elements of the fiction. In novels in particular, maternal relationships appear quite frequently, attesting to the significance of this theme. In novels by Denise Ch vez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Carla Trujillo, and Melinda Palacio, mother-daughter relationships are central to understanding the protagonists shaping of identity amidst interlocking forces of sexism, racism, homophobia, and classicism within the dominant culture. Ch vez, Castillo, and Cisneros are arguably the most well-known and most-studied of Chicana writers. Ch vez s novels, including The Last of the Menu Girls (1986) and Loving Pedro Infante (2001) have been the subject of multiple studies, as have her poetry and drama. Novels by Castillo, especially So Far From God (1993) and Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), have been exhaustively explored. Cisneros s status as a major American writer was sealed by the enormous success of The House on Mango Street (1984) and her collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek (1991). Novels by Carla Trujillo (What Night Brings) and Melinda Palacio (Ocotillo Dreams), however, have only recently been studied, and their works undoubtedly have a significant place within the Chicana literary canon. Despite the production of these important works, literary criticism has tended to ignore the prevalence of the mother-daughter relationships in these novels. Writers such as these have been highly influential in drawing attention to the rich Chicana literary landscape that has historically been marginalized within the American literary canon. Their novels offer critical glimpses into the worlds in which Chicanas and other women of color must navigate on a daily basis. Cognizant of their identities as non-white women maneuvering within and outside dominant culture and their own Chicana/o families, Chicana writers create fictional works that resist silence and invisibility. Despite the growing literary scholarship on Chicana writers, few, if any, studies have exhaustively explored themes of motherhood, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships in their novels. When discussions of motherhood and mother-daughter relationships do occur in literary scholarship, they tend to mostly be a backdrop to a larger conversation on themes such as identity, space, and sexuality, for example. Mother-daughter relationships have been ignored in much literary criticism, but this book reveals that maternal relationships are crucial to the study of Chicana literature; more precisely, examining maternal relationships provides insight to Chicana writers rejection of intersecting power structures that otherwise silence Chicanas and women of color. This book advances the field of Chicana literary scholarship through a discussion of Chicana writers efforts to re-write the script of maternity outside of existing discourses that situate Chicana mothers as silent and passive and the subsequent mother-daughter relationship as a source of tension and angst. Chicana writers are actively engaged in the process of re-writing motherhood that resists the image of the static, disempowered Chicana mother; on the other hand, these same writers engage in broad representations of Chicana mother-daughter relationships that are not merely a source of conflict but also a means in which both mothers and daughters may achieve subjectivity. While some of the texts studied do present often conflicted relationships between mothers and their daughters, the novels do not comfortably accept this script as the rule; rather, the writers included in this study are highly invested in re-writing Chicana motherhood as a source of empowerment even as their works present strained maternal relationships. Chicana writers have challenged the pervasiveness of the problematic virgin/whore binary which has been the motif on which Chicana womanhood/motherhood has been defined, and they resist the construction of maternity on such narrow terms. Many of the novels included in this study actively foreground a conscious resistance to the limiting binaries of motherhood symbolized in the virgin/whore split. The writers critically call for a rethinking of motherhood beyond this scope as a means to explore the empowering possibilities of maternal relationships. This book is an important contribution to the fields of Chicana/Latina and American literary scholarship.

Ian McEwan s works have always shown an interest in the question of how fiction operates. This interest does not usually manifest on the formal level. A few of the early stories aside, his fictions are not formally experimental. McEwan tends to opt for those reliable patternings of space, time and narrative progression that enable readers to trust the authorial environment sufficiently to identify with characters and become invested, to some extent, in what happens to them. Readers frequently enter the mind or consciousness of a central character that of Stephen, in The Child in Time (1987), when he realizes he has lost his daughter at the supermarket, or Joe s, in Enduring Love (1997), when he helps saves a boy in a balloon from dying and observe the decisions they make and the actions that follow from them. Nonetheless, McEwan s early stories and first two short novels of the 1970s and early 1980s, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), in particular, contain characters who resist readerly identification. Despite McEwan s commitment, by and large, to naturalistic means of telling a story, his later novels also demonstrate a concern with opacity, as characters often pursue courses of action for reasons that are unclear to them. Equally often, these actions bear some relation to the intrinsic opacity or enigma of one s sexual desires, one s relation to one s mortality, or one s relation to the actions of those human beings who have gone before one, as this book will show. It is this focus on enigma in McEwan s work, whether sexual, mortal, or historical, that lends it to a psychoanalytic reading such as the kind pursued in this book, because for psychoanalysis there is no such thing as full access to one s self or to one s feelings or motivations. Given that one s relation to history is also opaque in the sense that one grasps fully or imagines one grasps fully only those historical events which predate or otherwise excludes one, this study seeks historical reasons for why McEwan sometimes blocks readerly identification with characters in the early fiction. For these characters are also products of their environments, environments which the characters relative opacity and unlikeability seems to offset and exaggerate or present in a manner showcased for one's judgment. And in this way the characters environment is denaturalized, to say the least. This book reveals how all of these works explore, to some extent, the human tendency to act and feel, in particular situations, in profound contradistinction to how one might prefer to think one would. This failure to coincide with one s image of how one would have expected, or preferred, to behave The Innocent s Leonard Marnham is not the cool, experienced lover of his imaginings, any more than Solar s Michael Beard is going to revamp his lifestyle or career produces instances of affective or imaginative excess, troubling images or feelings that can often only be allayed or dealt with by a further failure to coincide with one s desires. In this book, author Eluned Summers-Bremner shows that McEwan s interests in opacity not only become clear in significance and import but that his interests in human failure to coincide with one s views about the past and hopes for the future also appear as what they are: an ongoing concern with how one relates to the complex operation of human history.

Rebecca Brown has been dubbed the great secret of American letters. This Seattle-based lesbian author is especially known for being a writers writer, although her award-winning and widely translated book The Gifts of the Body is popular with an international reading audience. Brown s powerful, original, and extremely diverse oeuvre contains collections of essays and short stories, a modern bestiary, a fictionalized autobiography, a memoir in the guise of a medical dictionary, a libretto for a dance opera, a play, and various kinds of fantasy. Brown has a uniquely recognizable voice, writing as she does in a stark style that combines the minimalism of her literary ancestor Samuel Beckett with some of the incantatory rhythms of Gertrude Stein and the dark humor of Franz Kafka. Brown has been praised as an important source of inspiration by several contemporary authors such as the acclaimed Scottish writer Ali Smith. Unlike her more illustrious lesbian colleagues Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca Brown has been working in the shadows for the past thirty years to compose a challenging and highly rewarding oeuvre. Her writings form a fascinating countervoice to the current trend of homonormalization. Brown s unapologetic representations of violent or imbalanced same-sex relations and communities, as well as her fictional engagement with a history of homosexual stigmatization (and its continuation into the present), are of great cultural significance. Yet academic investigations of her oeuvre are still largely lacking. Thanks to its analysis of identities and identifications, this book covers the main areas that are of interest when studying Brown s oeuvre: the spheres of the social and the historical. In addition, the book reveals how literary texts like Brown s can resonate, substantiate, and inflect queer theory as well as social and psychoanalytic theories on (gendered or sexual) identifications. This book is the first study to examine critically the entire oeuvre of Rebecca Brown. It approaches Brown s work from the perspective of queer theory and social theory on identities and identifications. This framework is supplemented with critical appropriations of classic psychoanalytic thinking on the related concepts of incorporation, melancholia, and narcissism. A number of critics have recently sought to redefine theories on social identity-construction by shifting the debate from the notion of identity to the more dynamic concept of identification. Such theories benefit from a concerted attention to literary texts that embody identification processes, put them to the test, and make them tangible. Brown s closely considered writings offer an unusually rewarding case study in this respect, and require attention to both the spheres of the social and the historical. The book explores the processes of identity formation in Brown s work in two social contexts: that of biological and queer kinship. It examines Brown s demythologization of the nuclear family and argues that in the context of queer kinship, too, Brown s presentations take the form of a critical examination (tackling taboo subjects such as identity-formation in positions of extreme dependency). The book also explores the historical identifications taking place in Brown s oeuvre, addressing their autobiographical nature and contesting a reading of Brown s characters as traditional minority subjects in full possession of their life stories. This is an important book for research on women writers, queer studies, and contemporary literature.

Since coming to power in 2007, the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN) has proclaimed itself the government of the poor and the government of peace and reconciliation. Accordingly, the regime has endeavoured to control and manipulate the symbols, social images, important spaces, and situations of popular struggles for social justice in the country. Under the watch of Daniel Ortega s administration, Nicaragua has become a country where an extraordinary effort is put into social spectacles, propaganda, and theatricality to create the impression of social and economic transformation. While the current regime orchestrates impressive social performances in support of its power, there are other social spectacles marking Nicaragua s urban landscape that tell a different story. These mine the gap between experiences and promises in today s Nicaragua. The exhibit of suffering bodies in public national spaces as political weapons by pesticide victims, as well as a transvestite circus spectacle in Managua redefine spaces and states of invisibility and visibility by articulating social positions through performance. The bodies of these Nicaraguans refusing to be invisible show Nicaragua s ongoing social drama of a predominant social power relation of inclusion and exclusion within a narrative intersected by political power, marginality and theatricality. As spectacularized bodies, they become avenues for showing processes of structural violence. Although there has been some excellent academic research focusing on performance or/and theatre in Nicaragua, such scholarship seldom attends to the very important connections between daily staged public social acts and local, national/global politics that deal directly and indirectly with marginalized social/cultural landscapes in this country. This book fills the gap by examining the connections between Nicaragua s marginalized landscapes and bodies, between social/political visibility and invisibility, and the relationship between social abandonment and social encompassment in the nation. Three sites form the core of this study: the current government s commoditized performances of compassion for the poor and traditionally excluded components of Nicaraguan society; fringe circuses and their displays of sexual marginality in undesirable urban areas; and, exhibits of suffering bodies in public national spaces as political weapons (aimed at the government and multinationals) by former banana plantation workers. One of the main contributions of Performance, Theatre, and Society in Contemporary Nicaragua is in its collective gathering of insights in areas of performance studies and ethnography that highlight and invoke local epistemes to critique Western ideologies and paradigms. With a view to furthering a critical ethnographic/performative epistemology, the book explores the methodological potentialities of research and presentation in Nicaragua. Through a methodology that combines ethnography and performance studies, called here presentational ethnography, the book brings together theoretical and interpretive insights about the links among neoliberal politics, nostalgia of the revolution and public spectacles that challenge prescribed notions of gender, sexuality and marginality in Nicaragua. Performance, Theatre, and Society in Contemporary Nicaragua is an important book for performance studies, social cultural anthropology, theatre studies and Latin American studies.

Chinese poetry, along with many other art forms in China, underwent a highly self-conscious transformation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Poetry, perhaps more than any other art form, did so under the heavy burden of a voluminous literary precedent, a precedent which was in its very format of patterned words inscribed on scrolls a mark of the Chinese literati tradition. Turning away from this tradition seemed necessary in the context of a political, social, and cultural reform movement (which was designed to strengthen China in the face of increasing international pressure as well as domestic breakdown). At the same time, reforming a poetic tradition which had served as a principal touchstone of aesthetic accomplishment from its role in Confucian canon as object of contemplation for correct action, to its function as a test of candidate's qualifications to govern through the civil service examination, to its function as national past-time in all manner of social gathering was a major challenge. The result of such a predicament for poets throughout the twentieth century has been the compulsion to discover a poetic style which resonates with the modern world and yet is rooted in Chinese cultural experience. One way in which poets have been able to accomplish this is by relying on poetry's visuality, be it in the graphic properties of the writing system itself, the visual context of the presentation of the poetic texts, or the acute image details in the poems. The history of approximately one century of modern Chinese poetry production has been addressed broadly in scholarship, but such broad strokes tend to miss important dynamics which fall outside of general narratives. The importance of Chinese visual tradition to modern Chinese poets is a good case in point. Accordingly, this book addresses specific manifestations of the nexus connecting modernity and visuality in Chinese poetry. It begins with a discussion of May Fourth poetics as exemplified in the groundbreaking work of Li Jinfa, China's first "e;Symbolist"e; poet. From there the book traces notable developments of visuality in the new form or free verse writing (called Xinshi or "e;New Poetry"e;) through mid-century modernist experiments in Taiwan (focusing on Ji Xian). From there the book then explores the avant-garde poetry of Luo Qing and Xia Yu before returning to mainland Chinese developments of Misty poets Yan Li and his contemporaries. The work concludes with a wide variety of poet-artists writing and exhibiting in the twenty-first century. Looking across this period of modern Chinese poetry's development, one is able to observe how important the visual-verbal dynamic has been to the innovation of poetic style and method. From the twenty-first century on, such multi-media expressions will likely continue to grow; this is a function of a Chinese aesthetic tradition pairing word and image and will continue to manifest in new and more inventive ways. This is an important book for Asian literary and art history studies and history collections.

Conversant in critical and creative modes of thought, this book examines the uses of translation in Asian and Anglophone literatures to bridge discontinuous subjectivities in Eurasian transnational identities and translingual hybridizations of literary Modernism. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations focuses on the roles of mysticism and language in Dict e's poetic deconstruction of empire, engaging metaphysical issues salient in the history of translation studies to describe how Theresa Cha and four other authors Sui Sin Far, Chuang Hua, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Virginia Woolf used figurative and actual translations to bridge discontinuous subjectivities. The author Karen Lee s explorations of linguistic politics and poetics in this eclectic group of writers concentrates on the play of innovative language deployed to negotiate divided or multiple consciousness. Over the past decade, emerging scholarship on transnationalism and writers of Asian heritage has focused primarily on diasporic Asian literary production on American soil. For instance, Rachel Lee s seminal publication, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999), examines how Asian American feminist literary criticism is shaped by global-local influences in the United States. Additionally, Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (2006), edited by Shirley Lim, et al., explores the transnational aspects of Asian literature in America, analyzing a discursive globalized imaginary as American writers Asian of heritage move within and across national boundaries. Following Lim s anthology, Lan Dong s Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine (2010) concerns the representations of women transposed from Asian oral traditions of women warriors to the United States. However, less scholarship on the Anglophone literatures of Asia and the Americas has focused on Asian writers within broader comparative frameworks of global perspectives outside Asian American literature and in comparison to Asian British literature, or aside from the parameters of specific Asia-to-America tropes such as the aforementioned woman warrior, as in Sheng-mei Ma s Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998), or Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa s Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001). Uniquely situated among these discussions, Lee s book extends current lines of inquiry by including the oeuvres of diasporic Asian writers in Asia, America, and abroad, presenting their works within the contexts of transnationalism via the dual lenses of translation and translingual migration. As new scholarship, this book foregrounds literary transnationalism and translingual migrations in a context of East to West as a study of representative Anglophone literatures in the Asian diaspora. Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations is highly relevant to university teaching audiences in postcolonial literature, Asian American studies, Anglophone writers of the Asian diaspora, cultural feminism, Eurasian studies, and translation studies.

This book by renowned anthropologist Harald Haarmann illuminates the acquisition of knowledge, and the meanings underlying forms of knowledge, in a broad temporal scope, ranging from the Neolithic through the modern era. Spiritual knowledge is at the heart of this work, which views myth and religion encoded in Neolithic female figurines and revived in the contemporary primitive artwork of artists such as Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore. Within such a framework, this study employs the knowledge and insights of the relatively new, and very important, interdisciplinary field of archaeomythology, which ties together information from archaeology, DNA studies, mythology, anthropology, classical studies, other ancient language studies, and linguistics. This study does so with a wealth of information in these fields, offering meaningful resolutions to many questions regarding antiquity, and shedding light upon several previously misunderstood phenomena, from the true function of Stonehenge (that its purpose was not astronomical), to the fact that there could not have been a mass movement of agriculturalists from Anatolia to Europe (this is a currently hotly contested issue), to important Eurasian religious beliefs and mythological motifs (with an excellent discussion of shamanism), to systems of writing (with a wonderful discourse upon ancient writing systems), religious expression, and mythology of the exceptionally significant cultures of Old Europe (Neolithic southeastern Europe). The book further discourses upon the legacy of this culture in Minoan and then Greek culture, Old European (pre-Indo-European) lexical items (that is, substrate vocabulary) in Greek, and finally the preservation of Neolithic spirituality in Modern Art. With this interdisciplinary approach, the study demonstrates that all of the subjects of this study are interconnected, in a powerful wholeness. Ancient knowledge, Ancient know-how, Ancient reasoning is an unprecedented study that will appeal across many disciplines, including archaeology, mythology, anthropology, classical studies, ancient language studies, and linguistics. The book also includes several images, maps, and tables that will prove helpful to the reader.

The identification and characterization of Spain s enemies is a complex endeavor, not only because there have been many over the centuries but also because this set of enemies implies a set of protagonists, empires, wars, territories, incursions, and frameworks to organize them all into historical narratives. This book demonstrates the evolution of Spain s conceptualisation of its enemies, from biblical and Roman times to the early modern period, and it also illustrates how this transformative discourse became exercised upon Spain by its own enemies in Europe. Each chapter contributes to the study of multiplicity as both a problem to be studied as well as a scholarly methodology that anticipates the structure of the problem. Conceived as a tightly knit series of case studies that sustain and strengthen these two particular arguments in a relatively chronological fashion, each chapter contributes to the study of multiplicity as both a problem to be studied as well as a scholarly methodology that anticipates the structure of the problem. This interrogation of the integrity of primary sources, the effects of mass-production and the distribution of information, as well as the legacy that remains as a consequence of editorial intervention, reveals the almost universal establishment of a non-Spanish version of the Spanish conquest. That is, in the balance of multiple historical narratives about the conquest that possess lexical and structural nuances, two principal discursive strategies emerge. This book is divided into three thematic sections, the first of which establishes the medieval roots for representing Spain s early modern enemies. The two chapters that compose this section respectively explore the naming and visualization of an enemy that was almost entirely Muslim. The second section contains two chapters that explore the textual and visual references to Islam in the Americas during the conquest and early in the period of colonization. The last section contrasts the quality of information conveyed by archival and mass-produced texts. The first of two chapters notes that Muslims indeed did come to the Spanish Americas in the early modern period. The archival research prepared for this chapter contrasts with the mass-produced images and texts in the last chapter, and it is argued that different qualities of information are communicated by mass-produced, and therefore shaped, discourse, rather than by uncirculated, unarticulated texts. That is, out of the archives, a different picture of Islam in the Americas emerges. The final chapter examines how Spanish-authored chronicles became transformed through translation, and with the attachment of new illustrations, into propagandistic tools designed to undermine Spanish conquest and claims on land. Transforming the Enemy in Spanish Culture identifies and illustrates the discourse imposed upon Spain s enemies, and demonstrates how other Europeans used that same discourse to de-Occidentalize, disparage and criticize Spanish activities in the early modern period. Each chapter explores the implications of textual and visual multiplicity while questioning the impact multiplicity has had on the conceptualization of the conquest in more modern times. Scholars of history and literature will appreciate different aspects of this book s arguments. The former will encounter in-depth and copious archival sources about the conquest and its related themes, whereas the latter will enjoy the text-image and literary analysis of those aforementioned sources.

Virginia Woolf has for many years been seen as a key participant in British literary modernism. Following a period of relative critical neglect following her tragic death in 1941, her body of work has earned her recognition as a groundbreaking feminist thinker, a perceptive literary critic, a formidably creative diarist and correspondent, and as one of the twentieth century s leading essayists. Most notably, her experimental fiction, from her first novel The Voyage Out to the posthumously published Between the Acts, has grown in both popularity and critical renown. All of her work remains in print, and novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob s Room are regularly read and discussed both inside and outside the academy. Few modernist writers indeed, few writers of any period have had such a pronounced and lasting impact on literary culture. There has been, and continues to be, an enormous amount of critical and scholarly work done on almost all aspects of Woolf s writing and life. Monographs, journal articles, and collections of essays dedicated to Woolf s writing appear every year alongside scholarly and popular biographies, and there is an annual international conference dedicated solely to her work. Yet amidst this veritable inundation of exegetical energy, this tremendous and ever-growing body of scholarly work on Woolf, there is one curious omission. While Woolf was both in theory and practice fascinated by questions of character and characterization, scholarship has not generally been directed towards this field. This may be due to both general theoretical discomfort with the critical category of character, and to a sense that Woolf s work in particular may not respond well to such interpretations. However, Woolf was very much an experimenter in character, and readings that minimize or ignore this interest miss an important facet of her work. This book offers the first full-length reading of Virginia Woolf s career-long experimentation in character. It examines her early journalism, from her short reviews of contemporary literature to more substantial essays on Gissing and Dostoyevsky, for indications of her engagement with questions of characterization, and links this interest to her later fictional writings. In The Voyage Out she establishes a continuum of levels of characterization, a key element of which is the Theophrastan type, an alternative form of characterization that corresponds to a way of knowing real people, while in Jacob s Room she seeks to represent an elusive essence that may exist outside of the structuring forms of social life, and which is accessible through speculative identification. Mrs Dalloway explores the shaping of character through social pressure, and To the Lighthouse proposes a simplified version of character as an ethically acceptable way of relating to other people. A similar notion is picked up in The Waves, in which a limited character, or form of caricature, is proposed as a possible solution to the problems of characterization. In Between the Acts, many of these themes reappear as Woolf simultaneously situates her characters more firmly than ever in a comprehensible physical and social context, and explores areas where language and rationality fail. Virginia Woolf: Experiments in Character is an important book for Woolf studies in particular, modernism studies more generally, and literature collections.