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  Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

  Graham MacPhee

  This radical reassessment shows how, after the Second World War, British national identity and culture was shaped in ways that still operate today. As empires declined, globalisation spread, and literature responded to these influences. As Graham MacPhee explains, postwar writers blended the experimentalism of prewar modernism with other cultural traditions. In this way, they reveal both the pain and the pleasures of multiculturalism, as they seek to cope with the shock of post-imperial downsizing.

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  The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture

  Graham MacPhee

  Visual technology saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual-now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy-have interpreted this new condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. Intellectuals-from Baudelaire to Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida-have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual, but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire's flaneur to Benjamin's arcades. The Architecture of the Visible presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary approaches to visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York-two key world cities for over two centuries-Graham MacPhee analyzes how visual technology is revolutionizing the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.

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  Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective

  Graham MacPhee and Prem Poddar

  The growing debate over British national identity, and the place of "Englishness" within it, raises crucial questions about multiculturalism, postimperial culture and identity, and the past and future histories of globalization. However, discussions of Englishness have too often been limited by insular conceptions of national literature, culture, and history, which serve to erase or marginalize the colonial and postcolonial locations in which British national identity has been articulated. This volume breaks new ground by drawing together a range of disciplinary approaches in order to resituate the relationship between British national identity and Englishness within a global framework. Ranging from the literature and history of empire to analyses of contemporary culture, postcolonial writing, political rhetoric, and postimperial memory after 9/11, this collection demonstrates that far from being parochial or self-involved, the question of Englishness offers an important avenue for thinking about the politics of national identity in our postcolonial and globalized world.

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  An Exalted House

  Paul Maltby

  PR man George Burghess, employed to whitewash the name of a firm linked to a fatal factory fire, suffers torments of conscience. Then a friendship with a woman, who squats in the flat above his own, points the way to the redemption he seeks. But Burghess cannot give up a hard-won career in corporate PR and, instead, descends into spiritual ruin. Through its story of a soul in crisis, "An Exalted House" brings into view the warring sides of London: the corporate zone of hostile takeovers and monuments to financial power versus an alternative zone of popular-festive breakouts and squats, presided over by the spirit of William Blake.

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  Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment

  Paul Maltby

  Within the familiar clash of religious conservatism and secular liberalism Paul Maltby finds a deeper discord: an antipathy between Christian fundamentalism and the postmodern culture of disenchantment. Arguing that each camp represents the poles of America's virulent culture wars, he shows how the cultural identity, lifestyle, and political commitments of many Americans match either the fundamentalist profile of one who cleaves to metaphysical and authoritarian beliefs or the postmodern profile of one who is disposed to critical inquiry and radical-democratic values. Maltby offers a critique that operates in both directions. His use of the resources of postmodern theory to contest fundamentalism's doctrinal claims, ultra-right politics, anti-environmentalism, and conservative aesthetics informs his engagement with contemporary fundamentalist painting, spiritual warfare fiction, dominionist attitudes to nature, and a profoundly undemocratic interpretation of Christianity. At the same time, Maltby identifies some of fundamentalism’s legitimate spiritual concerns, assesses the cost of perpetual critique, and exposes the deficit of spiritual meaning that haunts the culture of disenchantment.

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  Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon

  Paul Maltby

  Critics who hold that postmodernist art is essentially non-adversarial and apolitical, Paul Maltby contends, have ignored the historical context of the postmodern focus on problems of language. In "Dissident Postmodernists", Maltby examines a major current of postmodernist fiction that can be read as a dissident response to developments of late capitalism that have transformed the field of language and communications. Among Maltby's models of dissident postmodernist writings are "Gravity's Rainbow", "The Public Burning", "Snow White" and more recent publications like "Vineland" and "Spanking the Maid". In a series of readings, he examines the ways in which these works respond to the erosion of the public sphere, the elevation of functionalist discourse, the enlargement of the state propaganda network, the corporate management of mass communications, and the diffusion of concept-poor language forms which limit social understanding. Alert to such developments, Maltby argues, dissident postmodernists such as Barthelme, Coover and Pynchon write with politicized perceptions of language and a heightened awareness of language as a medium of social integration.

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  The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique

  Paul Maltby

  In The Visionary Moment, Paul Maltby draws on postmodern theory to examine the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment, or 'epiphany', in twentieth-century American fiction. Engaging critically with the works of Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and William Faulkner, Maltby explains show the literary convention of the visionary moment promotes the myth that there is a superior level of knowledge that can redeem or regenerate the individual. He contends that this common-sense assumption is a paradigm that needs to be confronted and critiqued.

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  The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic

  Christopher Merkner

  Christopher Merkner is a Shirley Jackson for the contemporary Midwest, where the ties of family and community intersect darkly with suburban American life. In these stories, an enraged village gaslights unsuspecting vacationers and a young man delays a impending confession, fondling the nostrils of his mother’s pet pig. Sharp and uneasy, for these inheritors of tradition, that which binds them most closely—offering stability and identity and comfort—are precisely the qualities that set them back, pull them down, burden, limit, and ruin them.

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  Mirror on America: Essays and Images from Popular Culture

  Joan T. Mims and Elizabeth M. Nollen

  Mirror on America meets students where they are right now. Whether they have lived in America all their lives or have only just arrived, they can consider themselves experts in pop culture. After all, they participate in it every day. Brief, current essays and images on topics like hip-hop, our online lives, and, of course, vampires and zombies spark discussion and critical thinking. And because critical thinking should lead to solid writing, the book’s editorial apparatus gives students clear instruction and support for every step of the reading and writing process. Always engaging and always accessible,Mirror on America reflects the interests of students and the instructors who want them to become confident writers.

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  The Writer's Options: Lessons in Style and Arrangement

  Max Morenberg and Jeff Sommers

  The Writer's Options encourages readers to investigate their writing “options” through sentence-combining and rearrangement to create more sophisticated, more effective compositions. The text contains ample practice with arranging and rearranging sentences, paragraphs, and essays as a means of strengthening prose and conveying a more effective message.

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  Approaches to Teaching Homer's Iliad and Odyssey

  Kostas Myrsiades

  Homer's epics usually appear first in anthologies used for the general literature courses required of most college and high school students throughout the country. His influence extends beyond the confines of English and classics departments into seminars offered in comparative literature, history, philosophy, and the social sciences. This volume in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series describes how teachers present Homer in the classroom and convey to students the importance of his epics in Western culture.

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  Others Must Dance for the Lord Dionysus Now: a Poetic Memoir

  Kostas Myrsiades

  A poetic memoir in which mythic figures ascend from funeral spaces to stroll the village streets and descend again to light their darkened realms, of saints in wooden casings stern above the bedsheets of shuttered homes, of wrinkled men whose vineyards suck their life's wine, of wine-stained easrth and sun-dyed thighs, of returning home and leaving, again and again.

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  Reading Homer: Film and Text

  Kostas Myrsiades

  These nine new essays on Homer's epics deal not only with major Homeric themes of time (honor), kleos (fame), geras (rewards), the psychology of Homeric warriors, and the re-evaluation of type scenes, but also with Homer's influence on contemporary film. Following the introduction and an essay which sets the historical background for the epics, four essays are devoted to fresh analysis of key passages and themes while another four turn to a discussion of the film 'Troy' and Homer's influence on two other genres of American cinema.

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  Reading Homer's Iliad

  Kostas Myrsiades

  We still read Homer’s epic The Iliad two-and-one-half millennia since its emergence for the questions it poses and the answers it provides for our age, as viable today as they were in Homer’s own times. What is worth dying for? What is the meaning of honor and fame? What are the consequences of intense emotion and violence? What does recognition of one’s mortality teach? We also turn to Homer’s Iliad in the twenty-first century for the poet’s preoccupation with the essence of human life. His emphasis on human understanding of mortality, his celebration of the human mind, and his focus on human striving after consciousness and identity has led audiences to this epic generation after generation. This study is a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s 24 parts, meant to inform students new to the work. Endnotes clarify and elaborate on myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Iliad, in addition to bibliographies accompanying each book’s commentary.

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  Reading Homer’s Odyssey

  Kostas Myrsiades

  Homer’s Odyssey is the first great travel narrative in Western culture. A compelling tale about the consequences of war, and about redemption, transformation, and the search for home, the Odysseycontinues to be studied in universities and schools, and to be read and referred to by ordinary readers. Reading Homer’s Odyssey offers a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s themes that informs the non-specialist and engages the seasoned reader in new perspectives. Among the themes discussed are hospitality, survival, wealth, reputation and immortality, the Olympian gods, self-reliance and community, civility, behavior, etiquette and technology, ease, inactivity and stagnation, Penelope’s relationship with Odysseus, Telemachus’ journey, Odysseus’ rejection of Calypso’s offer of immortality, Odysseus’ lies, Homer’s use of the House of Atreus and other myths, the cinematic qualities of the epic’s structure, women’s role in the epic, and the Odyssey’s true ending. Footnotes clarify and elaborate upon myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Odyssey, in addition to the bibliographies that accompany each book’s commentary.

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  The Beat Generation: Critical Essays

  Kostas Myrsiades

  It has been fifty years since the Beats first came upon the literary scene and although the academy’s hostility toward the Beats has not completely abated, it has certainly diminished. Today mainstream publishers are adding many Beat titles to their lists, and students of Beat literature can draw upon a wealth of critical resources that have been published in the last twenty years. The fourteen critical essays gathered in this collection verify that Jack Kerouac is still the undisputed king of the Beats followed by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. At the same time, however, the Beat movement is shown to be broader and more far reaching than previously thought, encompassing names such as Oscar Zeta Acosta and William Kotzwinkle and even suggesting influences on contemporary German literature in authors like Wolf Wondratschek, Rolf Dieter Brinkman, and Jörg Fauser.

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  Karagiozis: 3 Classic Plays

  Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades

  From the Greek Karagiozis Folk/Popular Theater are presented in new English translations, 3 classic plays to celebrate 200 years of documented Karagiozis performances in Greece. The 3 plays are: "The hero Katsandonis", "Alexander the Great and the Cursed Snake", and "Karagiozis Baker".

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  Margins in the Classroom: Teaching Literature

  Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades

  Brings together established scholars and emerging voices from diverse backgrounds to show how politics and theory can and do affect the most pressing problems confronting the contemporary teacher of literature. The essays in this volume go beyond questioning and examining existing practices to suggest fresh approaches to teaching the expanding literary canon within the context of the politics of the educational institution.

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  Un-Disciplining Literature: Literature, Law, and Culture

  Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades

  This collection offers fresh and challenging essays by scholars in law, English and comparative literature, social and political thought, and communication studies. It explores unique angles of vision that allow us to read legal opinions as well as criminal cases, abortion clinic violence, trial testimony (victim impact statements), legal authority, and legal fictions of personal and national identity (passports). The literature it analyzes ranges from Shakespeare's Richard II and The Merchant of Venice to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Providing a breadth of material, this collection breaks through disciplinary boundaries as new voices challenge old paradigms, pushing marginalized questions into the center of the literature and law enterprise.

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  Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection: The Legal Culture and Trials, 1794-1795

  Linda Myrsiades

  Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection treats the legal culture that informed the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and its trials. Linda Myrsiades examines conflicts between state and federal courts and the judicial philosophy of Federalist judges, as well as grand jury charges, law reports, judges’ bench notes, and defense notes for the trials, to develop a portrait of the hegemony of official interpretations of the law. At the same time, the book illuminates popular attitudes about the courts and the law and explores the nature of extralegal courts operated by the people.
  
  Myrsiades captures the agitation-propaganda efforts mounted by rebel communities and groups together with petitions and speeches in the rebel assemblies in demonstrating that popular culture offered a clear politico-legal justification within the rebel movement on the unofficial side of legal culture. Myrsiades thus presents a holistic picture of the legal culture of the rebellion. Her examination denies the common perception that the rebel movement was incoherent and chaotic and presents an alternative view that its perceptions are a necessary correlative to understanding how treason law functioned and what its critical elements were in the late-eighteenth century, serving as a lesson for democracy in the present era.

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  From Treason to Runaway Slaves: Legal Culture in New Republic Trials, 1783–1808

  Linda Myrsiades

  Law in early America was culturally special, not just a foundation for history but for the culture that bound the nation and its collective identity. From Treason to Runaway Slaves studies six high-profile trials (military order, Indian murder, land seizure, treason, libel, interracial urban crime) that incorporate themes to which the early republic attached special significance. The trials demonstrate the criticality of legal culture and legal history and the central role of the rule of law in a democracy. Tracking the new nation’s bitterest and most challenging moments, we are led to ask what lies below the surface; what is American society really like; how did we come to be who we are?

  The book fits into the area of eighteenth-century legal culture and history, tracing across the chapters the development of early American law during the critical formative period 1783 to 1808 and focusing on important historical moments (courts martial in the American Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Philadelphia Yellow Fever epidemic, runaway slaves, among others). It attends to such areas of law as treason, libel, land law, murder, and racial justice as well as the growth of a legal profession and the changing influence of judges, juries, and lawyers.

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  Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance: Complexity and Construction in Greek Guerrilla Theater

  Linda Myrsiades and Kostas Myrsiades

  Traces the history of Greek resistance theatre which began under Nazi occupation.

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  Karagiozis: Culture and Comedy in Greek Puppet Theater

  Linda S. Myrsiades and Kostas Myrsiades

  Karagiozis—a form of comic folk drama employing stock puppet figures—was immensely popular in Greece until recent years, when newer forms of entertainment have virtually eclipsed it. Derived from ancient Byzantine and Greek sources, it takes its name from the principal puppet character, the clever, humpbacked fool-hero Karagiozis, who appears in many guises, surrounded by a cast of folk caricatures from all walks of life.
  
  
  

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  Ursa Minor and Other Poems

  Takis Papatsonis, Kimon Friar, and Kostas Myrsiades

  Modern Greek poetry by Takis Papatsonis. Translated by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades.

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  Beverly Cleary

  Pat Pflieger

  Finally an academic tome on one of America's most beloved children's authors. Pflieger discusses and analyzes all of Cleary works as well as giving some biographical material about her. Academic journals, popular press magazines and newspapers about Cleary's novels are all cited in order to provide other people's reviews and analysis of Cleary's works. This book is a must for anyone who has read any of Cleary's novel and would be particularly useful for college students who are thinking of becoming English teachers, librarians or Ph.D. students in children's literature. Unlike many academic writers, Pflieger's writing style is clear and easy to understand which is a nice contrast to all the boring, pedantic academic writings which are often employed when analyzing children's literature.