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Costa Rica is a country known internationally for its eco-credentials, dazzling coastlines, and reputation as one of the happiest and most peaceful nations on earth. Beneath this façade, however, lies an exclusionary rhetoric of nationalism bound up in the concept of the tico, as many Costa Ricans refer to themselves. Beginning by considering the very idea of national identity and what this constitutes, this book explores the nature of the idealised tico identity, demonstrating the ways in which it has assumed a white supremacist, Central Valley-centric, patriarchal, heteronormative stance based on colonial ideals. Chapters two and three then go on to consider the literature and films produced that stand in opposition to this normative image of who or what is tico and their creation as vehicles of soft power which aim to question social norms. This book explores protest literature from the 1970s by Quince Duncan, Carmen Naranjo, and Alfonso Chase who narrate their experiences from the margins of society by virtue of their identity as Afro-Costa Rican, feminist, and homosexual authors. Cinema from the twenty-first century is then analysed to demonstrate the nuanced and intersectional position chosen by national directors Esteban Ramírez, Paz Fábrega, Jurgen Ureña, and Patricia Velásquez to challenge the dominant nation-image as they reinscribe youth culture, Afro-Costa Rica, a female consciousness, and trans identity into the fabric of the nation.

This volume takes into account the variety of talents that inform not only Iris Murdoch’s twenty-six best-selling novels, but also her philosophical, theological and critical writing, which together express stringent views on art, politics and morality. It identifies Murdoch as a proudly Anglo-Irish writer whose work straddles the boundary between popular and intellectually serious novels which spanned the entire latter half of the twentieth century. This thematically based study outlines the overarching themes and issues that characterise her fiction decade by decade; explores her unique role as a British philosopher-novelist; explains the paradoxical nature of her outspoken atheism and highlights the neglected aesthetic aspect of her fiction, which innovatively extended the boundaries of realist fiction by borrowing from the visual arts, drama, poetics and music. The importance of the settings of her homeland of Ireland and her beloved London concludes the study, and while Iris Murdoch is acknowledged throughout as a writer who vividly evokes the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century she is also presented as one whose unconventional life and complex presentation of gender and psychology speaks perhaps more urgently to twenty-first century readers than they did to those of the century in which she wrote.

John Dos Passos & Cinema, the first study to use the novelist’s little-known writing for the screen to assess the trajectory of his prolific career, explores both how film aesthetics shaped his revolutionary modernist narratives and how he later reshaped them directly into film form. The book features previously unpublished manuscripts and correspondence illustrating case studies of his screen writing during the 1930s for Hollywood feature films and in an innovative independent treatment; it examines the complexities of his role in the 1937 political documentary The Spanish Earth; and it explores the unproduced screen treatment of his attempts from the 1940s on to adapt his epic trilogy U.S.A. directly for the screen and to realign its leftist politics toward the anti-Communist conservatism reflected in his work and activism of that period. John Dos Passos & Cinema thus provides a new context for and reading of his modernist literary innovations and his conservative political reorientation in the 1930s that redefined his literary career.

In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature can cure spiritual ills by making sufferers feel whole again. But this model oversimplifies the relationship between literature and pain, perpetuating a distorted picture of how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. The Poetics of Palliation documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley developed more complex, palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.

Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction examines fantastic representations of sport in science fiction, both cataloguing this almost entirely unexamined literary tradition and arguing that the reason for its neglect reflects a more widespread social suspicion of the athletic body as monstrous. Combining scholarship of monstrosity with a biopolitically focused philosophy of embodiment, this work plumbs the depths of our abjection of the athletic body and challenges us to reconsider sport as an intersectional space. In this latter endeavour it contradicts the image presented by both the most dystopian films such as Deathrace and Rollerball as well as social criticism of sport that limits its focus to an essentially violent masculinity. The book traces an alternative tradition of sport sf through authors as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Steven Barnes, and Joan Slonczewski, exploring the way the intersectional categories of gender, race, and age in these works are negotiated in, for example, a solar wind sailing race or futuristic anti-gravity boxing. These complex athletic bodies display the social mobility that sport allows and challenge us to acknowledge our own monstrously animal bodies and our place in a “cycle of living and dying.”

This book provides a comprehensive depiction of Ireland’s regional press during the turbulent years leading up to the foundation of the Irish Free State following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. It investigates the origins of the regional papers that reported this critical period of Irish history and profiles the personalities behind many of these publications. Furthermore, this book presents case studies of seventeen newspapers – nationalist, unionist, and independent – across the four provinces of Ireland. These case studies not only detail the history of the respective newspapers but also closely scrutinises the editorial commentary of each publication between 1914 and 1921. Consequently, a thorough analysis of how each of these regional titles responded to the many dramatic developments during these years is provided. This includes seminal events such as the outbreak of World War I, the Easter Rising of 1916, the rise of the Sinn Féin party, the War of Independence, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. During this time many of Ireland’s regional newspaper titles faced censorship, suppression, and in some cases, violent attack on their premises that threatened their livelihood. In some instances, newspaper owners, editors, and their staff were arrested and imprisoned. Their experiences during these years are meticulously detailed in this book.

In contrast to recent theories of the ‘global’ or ‘post-national’ Latin American novel, this book reveals the enduring importance of the national in contemporary Venezuelan fiction, arguing that the novels studied respond to both the nationalist and populist cultural policies of the Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuela’s literary isolation. The latter results from factors including the legacy of the Boom and historically low levels of emigration from Venezuela. Grounded in theories of metafiction and intertextuality, the book provides a close reading of eight novels published between 2004 (the year in which the first Minister for Culture was appointed) and 2012 (the last full year of President Chávez’s life), relating these novels to the context of their production. Each chapter explores a way in which these novels reflect on writing, from the protagonists as readers and writers in different contexts, through appearances from real life writers, to experiments with style and popular culture, and finally questioning the boundaries between fiction and reality. This literary analysis complements overarching studies of the Bolivarian Revolution by offering an insight into how Bolivarian policies and practices affect people on an individual, emotional and creative level. In this context, self-reflexive narratives afford their writers a form of political agency.

The Dinner at Gonfarone’s is organised as a partial biography, covering five years in the life of the young Nicaraguan poet, Salomón de la Selva, but it also offers a literary geography of Hispanic New York (Nueva York) in the turbulent years around the First World War. De la Selva is of interest because he stands as the largely unacknowledged precursor of Latino writers like Junot Díaz and Julia Álvarez, writing the first book of poetry in English by an Hispanic author. In addition, through what he called his pan-American project, de la Selva brought together in New York writers from all over the American continent. He put the idea of trans-American literature into practice long before the concept was articulated. De la Selva’s range of contacts was enormous, and this book has been made possible through discovery of caches of letters that he wrote to famous writers of the day, such as Edwin Markham and Amy Lowell, and especially Edna St Vincent Millay. Alongside de la Selva’s own poetry – his book Tropical Town (1918) and a previously unknown 1916 manuscript collection – The Dinner at Gonfarone’s highlights other Hispanic writing about New York in these years by poets such as Rubén Darío, José Santos Chocano, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, all of whom were part of de la Selva’s extensive network.

The diverse approaches to the Amazon collected in this book focus on stories of intimate, quotidian, interpersonal experiences (as opposed to those that take place between companies and nations) that, in turn, have resisted or else have been ignored by larger historical designs. This is why we propose a literary geography of the Amazon. In this space made out of historias, we will show the always already crafted, and hence political, ways in which this region has been represented in more “scientific”, often nationalizing histories. This includes, of course, understanding the “gigantic” discourses on Amazonia as rooted––if rarely discussed––in different quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The intimate interactions between one human being and another, or between men and animals, plants, or the natural space more generally as we see it, are not, as one might expect, comforting. Instead they are often disquieting, uncanny, or downright violent. This book argues that the Amazon’s “gigantism” lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness that inhabits its archive of historias in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.