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Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile explores the multiple aspects of exile, displacement, mobility, and identity as expressed in contemporary autofictional work written in French by women writers from across the francophone world. Drawing on postcolonial theory, gender theory, and autobiographical theory, the book analyses narratives of exile by six authors who are shaped by their multiple locales of attachment: Kim Lefèvre (Vietnam/France), Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe/mainland France), Nina Bouraoui (Algeria/France), Michèle Rakotoson (Madagascar/France), Véronique Tadjo (Côte d’Ivoire/France), and Abla Farhoud (Lebanon/Quebec). In this way, the book argues that the French colonial past continues to mould female articulations of mobility and identity in the postcolonial present. Responding to gaps in the critical discourse of exile, namely gender, this book brings genre in both its forms — gender and literary genre — to bear on narratives of exile, arguing that the reconceptualization of categories of mobility occurs specifically in women’s autofictional writing. The six authors complicate discussions of exile as they are highly mobile, hybrid subjects. This rootless existence, however, often renders them alienated and ‘out of place’. While ensuring not to trivialize the very real difficulties faced by those whose exile is not a matter of choice, the book argues that the six authors experience their hybridity as both a literal and a metaphorical exile, a source of both creativity and trauma. The autofictional mode of writing becomes a means for the authors to resolve the multiple personal conflicts which arise from their migration.

Axis / Axes to Grind studies various types of political themes in American World War II novels of three decades. “Political,” which is essentially about power and control, includes interpreting the meaning of the war and predicting the political climate of post-war America (The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions); exploring the dynamics of individual and group rebellions against military authority (From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny, Catch-22); and tracing conflicts between various minorities and the dominant socio-political ethos of military authority (White, Christian, heterosexual).These conflicts can occur among enlisted men (The Young Lions, From Here to Eternity) but more often between military policies, such as racial segregation, and minorities (And Then We Heard the Thunder, Guard of Honor, The Gallery). The locales of these conflicts are also various: on board a ship during a typhoon, at an Army Air Force training base, even in a war industry (If He Hollers, Let Him Go). War novels written well after the war tend to see the war through the lens of the authors’ own times. Thus, Slaughterhouse-Five is as much about anti-war protest during the Vietnam war as it is about the firebombing of Dresden. And in Gravity’s Rainbow, the industrial cartels that enable the V-2 rocket attacks against London prefigure the military-industrial complex of Pynchon’s time. Where necessary, the book provides historical context (e.g., the real typhoon that inspired The Caine Mutiny, Martha Gellhorn’s experience at Dachau, etc.) to further clarify the novels’ political themes.

This volume is the first-ever collection devoted to teaching Beat literature in high school to graduate-level classes. Essays address teaching topics such as the history of the censorship of Beat writing, Beat spirituality, the small press revolution, Beat composition techniques and ELL, Beat multiculturalism/globalism and its legacies, techno-poetics, the road tale, Beat drug use, the Italian-American Beat heritage, Beats and the visual arts of the 1960s, the Beat and Black Mountain confluence, Beat comedy, Beat performance poetry, Beat creative non-fiction, West coast-East/coast Beat communities, and Beat representations of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. Individual essays focus on Gary Snyder’s ecopoetics, William S. Burroughs’s post- and transhumanism, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (teaching it in the U.S. and abroad) and his Quebecois novels, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman. Many additional Beat-associated writers, such as Amiri Baraka Gregory Corso, are featured in the other essays. The collection opens with a comprehensive essay by Nancy M. Grace on a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, and contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts. Many of the essays highlight online resources and other materials proven useful in the classroom. Critical methods range from feminism/gender theory, to critical race theory, formalism, historiography, religious studies, and transnational theory to reception theory. The volume concludes with selected scholarly resources, both primary and secondary, including films, music, and other art forms; and a set of Beat-related classroom assignments recommended by active Beat scholars and teachers.

This edition presents and contextualizes an archive of letters -- belonging to the Wordsworth Trust -- that reveal the creative and personal significance of the friendship between William Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont. Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British Art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and the letters reveal that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry) the letters chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship that included Lady Beaumont and Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that—in influence, creativity, and affection—rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended critical study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.

This book explores traditional and contemporary concerns surrounding gender and ethnicity in Chile through a textual analysis of historical novels depicting seventeenth-century figure, Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer. Drawing on theories from the Global North and South, it incorporates postcolonial perspectives and decolonial feminist approaches to expose patriarchal, Eurocentric hierarchies constructed during the colonial era, which remain in Chilean society today. Through close readings, the book demonstrates that it is in the inconsistent and fluid depictions of characters that identities are deconstructed and reconstructed in ways that defy and transform social norms. This is the first extended English-language study of this infamous historical figure, who is more widely known as la Quintrala. It is also the first to compare the literary portrayals by Mercedes Valdivieso and Gustavo Frías. Looking beyond the infamy which usually shapes interpretations of la Quintrala, the author presents these novels as an embodiment of the anxieties surrounding hybridity in Chile, where European heritage has traditionally overshadowed indigenous concerns, and patriarchal norms dominate the construction of gender. Written during a period of social and political upheaval in Chile, it makes a timely contribution to existing works in social and political science, popular culture and the ongoing discussions of this iconic figure.

As a whole, no pervasive quality unites what we now deem Harlem Renaissance literature outside of the era in which it developed. The inconsistency and varied nature of the works therefore place an even greater emphasis on the editorial processes that produced this canon. While the popular period has received much scholarly attention, the significance of editors and editing in the Harlem Renaissance—aside from the formative efforts of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke—remains understudied. As a remedy, Editing the Harlem Renaissance foregrounds an in-depth approach to relevant editing and editorial issues, offering a variety of voices to become the first centralized authority on the subject. Rather than limiting the examination to a narrow understanding of editorial practices, this collection takes a broad and inclusive approach, exploring not only those figures of the Harlem Renaissance who edited in professional capacities but also those authors who employed editorial practices during the writing process, as well as those texts that have been discovered and/or edited by others in the decades following the Harlem Renaissance. To achieve this end, the collection comprises chapters in several areas, including professional editing, authorial editing, textual self-fashioning, textual editing, documentary editing, and bibliography.

The formulation ‘egalitarian strangeness’ is a direct borrowing from Courts voyages au pays du peuple [Short Voyages to the Land of the People] (1990), a set of essays by the contemporary French thinker Jacques Rancière. Perhaps best known for his theory of radical equality as set out in Le Maître ignorant [The Ignorant Schoolmaster] (1987), Rancière reflects on ways in which a hierarchical social order based on inequality can come to be unsettled. In the democracy of literature, for example, words and sentences, he argues, serve to capture any life and make that available to any reader. The present book explores embedded forms of social and cultural ‘apportionment’ in a range of modern and contemporary French texts (including prose fiction, socially engaged commentary, and autobiography), while also identifying scenes of class disturbance and egalitarian encounter. Part One considers the ‘refrain of class’ audible in works by Claude Simon, Charles Péguy, Thierry Beinstingel, Marie Ndiaye, and Gabriel Gauny. It also examines how these authors’ practices of language connect with that refrain. In Part Two, Hughes analyses forms of domination and dressage with reference to Simone Weil’s mid-1930s factory journal, Paul Nizan’s novel of class alienation Antoine Bloyé from the same decade, and Pierre Michon’s Vies minuscules [Small Lives] (1984) with its focus on obscure rural lives. The reflection on how these narratives draw into contiguity antagonistic identities is extended in Part Three, where individual chapters on Proust and the contemporary authors François Bon and Didier Eribon show enduring forms of cultural distribution being both consolidated and contested.

Excavating Exodus analyzes adaptations of Exodus in novels, newspapers, and speeches from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights era. Although Exodus has perennially served to mobilize resistance to oppression, Black writers have radically reinterpreted its meaning over the past two centuries. Changing interpretations of Moses’ story reflect evolving conceptions of racial identity, religious authority, gender norms, political activism, and literary form. Black writers transformed Moses from a paragon of race loyalty into an avatar of authoritarianism. Excavating Exodus identifies a rhetorical tradition initiated by David Walker and carried on by Martin Delany and Frances Harper that treats Moses' loyalty to his fellow Hebrews as his defining characteristic. By the twentieth century, however, a more skeptical group of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and William Melvin Kelley, associated Moses with overbearing charismatic authority. This book traces the transition from Walker, who treated Moses as the epitome of self-sacrifice, to Kelley, who considered Moses a flawed model of leadership and a threat to individual self-reliance. By asking how Moses became a touchstone for notions of racial belonging, Excavating Exodus illuminates how Black intellectuals reinvented the Mosaic model of charismatic male leadership.

This book examines the representation of the female fertility cycle in contemporary Algerian, Mauritian, and French women’s writing. It focuses on menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause whilst also incorporating experiences such as miscarriage and abortion. This study frames its analysis of contemporary women’s writing in French by looking back to the pioneering work of the second-wave feminists. Second-wave feminist texts were the first to break the silence on key aspects of female experience which had thus far been largely overlooked or considered taboo. Second-wave feminist works have been criticised for applying their ‘universal’ theories to all women, regardless of their ethnicity, socio-economic status, or sexuality. This book argues that contemporary women’s writing has continued the challenge against normative perceptions of the body that was originally launched by the second-wave feminists, whilst also taking a more nuanced, contextual and intersectional approach to corporeal experience. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach of this book is informed not only by critics of the second-wave feminist movement but also by sociological studies which consider how women’s bodily experiences are shaped by socio-cultural context.

Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones offers fertile reflection on the dynamics of linguistic diversity and multifaceted literary translation flows taking place across the Iberian Peninsula. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical perspectives from a comparative standpoint and on a historically diverse body of case studies, the volume’s sixteen chapters explore the key role of translation in shaping interliterary relations and cultural identities within Iberia. Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone metaphor is used as an overarching concept to approach Iberia as a translation(al) space where languages and cultural systems (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish) set up relationships either of conflict, coercion, and resistance or of collaboration, hospitality, and solidarity. In bringing together a variety of essays by multilingual scholars whose conceptual and empirical research places itself at the intersection of translation and literary Iberian studies, the book opens up a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry: Iberian translation studies. This allows for a renewed study of canonical authors such as Joan Maragall, Fernando Pessoa, Camilo José Cela, and Bernardo Atxaga, and calls attention to emerging bilingual contemporary voices. In addition to addressing understudied genres (the entremez and the picaresque novel) and the specific phenomena of self-translation, indirect translation, and collaborative translation, the book provides fresh insights into Iberian cultural agents, mediators, and institutions such as publishing houses and theatre companies. Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones is indispensable reading for those interested in Iberian studies, translation studies, in particular the history of translation in the Iberian Peninsula, and comparative literature.

This book sets Henry Vaughan in the context of his own time and in the context of the development of Vaughan studies since his work was rediscovered during the first half of the nineteenth century. Each chapter contains a relatively free-standing treatment of a single topic, but the ten main chapters are organized into a structure that progressively opens up biographical, intellectual, political, religious, and literary aspects of the man and his work. The topics chosen for consideration are areas of current research and ongoing critical debate. Part One deals with Vaughan’s relation to the world in which he lived: the topography and social context of his native Breconshire; his ideas about God and Nature; his royalist affiliation during the civil wars; his opposition to the Puritan regime imposed upon South Wales; and his encouragement of members of the outlawed Church of England during the Interregnum. Part Two explores literary features of his practice of the art of poetry: the unusual degree of intertextuality with the poetry of George Herbert and other poets; his use of typology and scriptural allusion; nature imagery and description of the natural world; and elements of poetic craftsmanship, such as rhyme, rhythm, and form.

Life as Creative Constraint is the first book to focus on the extraordinary life- writing of the French experimental writing group, the Oulipo. The Oulipo’s enthusiasm for literary games and formal gymnastics has seen its work caricatured as ‘lifeless’ – impressively virtuoso but more interested in form than content and ultimately disengaged from the world. This book examines a broad corpus of work by Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Roubaud, and Anne F. Garréta to show that, despite the group’s early devotion to the radical impersonality of mathematics, later generations of Oulipians have brought the group’s fascination with systems, games, and constraints to bear on autobiography. Far from being ‘lifeless’, Oulipian constraints and concepts provide the tools that allow writers to engage critically and creatively with lived experience, and mine the potential of the autobiographical genre. The games played by these writers are not simply pastimes or cunning writing techniques, but modes of survival, self-examination, self-invention, and relating to the world and to others. As the title of Georges Perec’s masterpiece suggests, they are a mode d’emploi for life.

Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom explores the role played by literature written during the century following the Amazon rubber boom (1850-1920) in imagining a new fate for the river basin beyond the destructive practices of resource extraction. It problematizes well-intentioned literary projects to map the region otherwise by charting their impact in framing contemporary struggles against the division and commodification of Amazonia. Authors José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, and Márcio Souza deliberately described the Amazonian regions of their respective countries in contrast to state and corporate projections, and the acceptance of their Amazonian novels in the Latin American literary canon has given power to their geographic representations. Smith reveals how authors sometimes mapped imperfectly, misrepresenting cultural geographies, erasing lived realities, and speaking for unacknowledged sources. Navigating Amazonia across its real and fictional landscapes, this book seeks to identify where literary configurations of the region have shaped geopolitics. This spatial reexamination of influential twentieth-century novels suggests that even literary works implicated in the ongoing repurposing of the rubber fields of the past can also plot pathways out of the cycles of extractivism.

What is the purpose of travel in an age when millions are displaced against their will or have no home to speak of in the first place? How can we travel without being tourists, without erasing the stories of those who live where we visit? These are some of the questions addressed in Cristian Aliaga’s compelling collection of prose poems, Music for Unknown Journeys. This collection contains Aliaga’s “travelling sketches,” in the tradition of Matsuo Bashō, John Berger, or W.G. Sebald. Each prose poem is geographically situated in his travels across Patagonia or his more recent journeys around the edge-lands of Europe. His work is politically acute, exploring struggles over territory, resources, and culture, in the places he visits. There is an intense emotional charge as he records the stories of those who globalization and contemporary capitalism have used and left behind. This volume brings together a generous selection of Aliaga’s prose poems, the majority previously unseen in English, as well as a substantial introduction to the author’s work and its context, both literary and political, by the editor and translator. Cristian Aliaga (b. 1962, Tres Cuervos, Province of Buenos Aires) is one of Argentina’s foremost contemporary poets. His work has been highly praised in the TLS and elsewhere. “No poet has been as intrepid as Aliaga in exploring that outer edge of modern consciousness at which the individual mind and the macroeconomic order meet,” Michael Kerrigan, TLS.

The Pointe of the Pen examines the influence of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ballet on contemporaneous English poetry Originally a courtly art, ballet experienced dramatic evolution (but never, significantly, the prospect of extinction) as attitudes toward courtliness itself shifted in the aftermath of the French Revolution; as a result, it afforded a valuable model to poets who, like Wordsworth and his successors, aspired to make the traditionally codified, formal, and, to some degree, aristocratic art of poetry compatible with “the very language of men” and, therefore, relevant to a new class of readers. Moreover, as a model, ballet was visible as well as valuable. Dance historians recount the extraordinary popularity of ballet and its practitioners in the nineteenth century, and The Pointe of the Pen challenges literary historians’ assertions—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—that its focus authors were immune to the balletomania that shaped both Romantic and Victorian England, as well as Europe more broadly. The book’s introduction and three chapters engage both primary documents (dance treatises, performance reviews, and the like) and scholarly histories of dance to describe the ways in which ballet’s unique culture and aesthetic manifest in the forms, images, and ideologies that define some of Wordsworth’s, Byron’s, Shelley’s, and Barrett Browning’s most significant poems.

Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance confronts how Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-think memory and resistance in response to dynamic political and regional changes in the twenty-first century; prolonged spatial and temporal dispossession; and the continued deterioration of the peace process. Insofar as the articulation of memory in (post)colonial contexts can be viewed as an integral component of a continuing anti-colonial struggle for self-determination, in tracing the dynamics of conveying the memory of ongoing, chronic trauma, this collection negotiates the urgency for Palestinians to reclaim and retain their heritage in a continually unstable and fretful present. The collection offers a distinctive contribution to the field of existing scholarship on Palestine, charting new ways of thinking about the critical paradigms of memory and resistance as they are produced and represented in literary works published within the post-millennial period. Reflecting on the potential for the Palestinian narrative to recreate reality in ways that both document it and resist its brutality, the critical essays in this collection show how Palestinian writers in the twenty-first century critically and creatively consider the possible future(s) of their nation.

Throughout history, most people have encountered the language of sailors in ports. Such language, including nautical terminology, occupational lore, and the coterie speech that bound crews together, was a product of isolated shipborne communities at sea, but it was when sailors entered the liminal space of the port that the general public heard their speech. The language of sailors was often greeted with contempt and fear. The Boston Recorder warned in 1823 that when sailors are ashore, “Children can with difficulty enter the streets at all, without hearing the very dialect of hell.” Despite such condemnation, it was in the spoken world of sailor talk that Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London first became storytellers. They were all seafarers who transcribed their experiences at sea into stories, first told orally and then transformed into the written word. With their storytelling, they crossed the liminal space of the port and emerged as the great artists that they are. This book defines sailor talk, explores its inextricability from the labor of mariners, and investigates the orality of the shipboard world in which sailors worked. It then concentrates on the complex, multitudinous, and intertwining use of sailor talk in the works of Melville, Conrad, and London.

This book reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. It shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G. S. Street, the Sitwells, J. J. Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, the book remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious, expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.

- Shame is one of the most frequent underlying emotions expressed throughout sub-Saharan African literature, yet studies of such literature almost universally ignore the topic in favour of a focus on the struggle for independence and the postcolonial situation, encompassing a search for individual, national, and ethnic identities and questions of corruption, changing gender roles, and conflicts between so-called tradition and modernity. Shame, however, is not antithetical to these investigations and, in fact, the persistent trope of shame undergirds many of them. This book locates these expressions of shame in sub-Saharan African literature and shows how its diverse literary representations underscore shame’s function as a fulcrum in the mutual constitution of subject and community on the continent. Though shame research is dominated by Western definitions and theories, this study emphasizes the centrality of African conceptions of shame in ways that notions of Western subjectivity dismiss or cannot capture.

Shelley’s Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley’s poetic art and thought. Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley’s expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley’s artistry and his thought. This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished ‘Marlow List’, a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley’s prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points. He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet’s death, Shelley’s Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.