Beginning with Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Passionate Amateurs tells a new story about modern theater: the story of a romantic attachment to theater’s potential to produce surprising experiences of human community. Ridout argues that theater in modern capitalism can help us think afresh about notions of work, time, and freedom. Passionate Amateurs tells a new story about modern theater: the stor…
At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed ""death,"" Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result …
This collection of essays explores the history of the book in pre-modern South Asia looking at the production, circulation, fruition and preservation of manuscripts in different areas and across time. Edited by the team of the Cambridge-based Sanskrit Manuscripts Project and including contributions of the researchers who collaborated with it, it covers a wide range of topics related to South As…
This study examines the Black Women’s Renaissance (BWR) – the flowering of literary talent among African American women at the end of the 20th century. It focuses on the historical and heritage novels of the 1980s and the vexed relationship between black cultural nationalism and black feminism. It argues that when the nation seemingly fell out of fashion, black women writers sought to re-cr…
Explores both the theory and practice of rhythm in literature with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. Emphasis on rhythm’s role in contemporary literary criticism, including debates about poetic form and genre. This collection intervenes in recent debates over formalism, historicism, poetics, and lyric by focusing on one of literary criticism’s most important, most vested, …
What do The Age of Innocence, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Sex and the City have in common? Strong women ahead of their time! Being part of New York’s middle and upper class, Ellen Olenska, Holly Golightly and Carrie Bradshaw & Co. cherish their otherness and strive for personal freedom and gender equality, thereby trying to combine traditional longings and modern beliefs. However, though si…
This open access edited collection examines representations of human trafficking in media ranging from British and Serbian newspapers, British and Scandinavian crime novels, and a documentary series, and questions the extent to which these portrayals reflect the realities of trafficking. It tackles the problematic tendency to under-report particular types of victim and forms of trafficking, and…
"The year 2019 marked a number of significant anniversaries for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), each representing different ‘Chinese dreams’. There was the centennial of the May Fourth Movement — a dream of patriotism and cultural renewal. The PRC celebrated its seventieth anniversary — a dream of revolution and national strength. It was also thirty years since the student-led P…
"Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange. As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been i…
The Kakawin Ramayana, arguably the oldest Old Javanese epic text in Indic metres (circa 9th century AD), holds a unique position in the literary heritage of Indonesia. The poem has retained a remarkable vitality through the centuries in the Archipelago, inspiring many forms of artistic expression not only in the domain of literature but also in the visual and performing arts, from the reliefs o…