In his first long-range undertaking, the author mixes a variety of genres to explore the themes of the subconscious. The action is already well underway from the outset: he is looking for hints that could lead him to the arms of an ever-evasive woman. Partially travelogue and philosophical elucidation, Clover Cliff Revisited takes place mainly in Paris, where the artist draws most of his inspiration.

The Indo-European dispersal inalterably shaped the Eurasian linguistic landscape. This book offers the newest insights into this dramatic prehistoric event.

Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that absorb so much of our attention and emotional lives. In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the various dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close to characters, or hold us at a distance from them, and how our beliefs and attitudes are formed and sometimes reformed by these encounters. Integrating these arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, Engaging Characters advances an account of the nature of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience. In this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new introduction reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and film spectatorship that the book has inspired.

Their roots lie in the heavy rock of 70s groups like Deep Purple. The music they played—heavy metal mixed with punk attitude—became its own genre: thrash. Their bassist died and they survived to became the biggest-selling band in the world. As grunge threatened to overtake them, they reinvented themselves. Then their singer went into rehab and they almost fell apart. They are Metallica, the most influential heavy metal band of the last thirty years. As Led Zeppelin was for hard rock and the Sex Pistols were for punk, Metallica became the band that defined the look and sound of 1980s heavy metal. Inventors of thrash metal—Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth followed—it was always Metallica who led the way, who pushed to another level, who became the last of the superstar rockers. Metallica is the fifth-largest selling artist of all time, with 100 million records sold worldwide. Their music has extended its reach beyond rock and metal, and into the pop mainstream, as they went from speed metal to MTV with their hit single "Enter Sandman". Until now there hasn't been a critical, authoritative, in-depth portrait of the band. Mick Wall's thoroughly researched, insightful work is enriched by his interviews with band members, record company execs, roadies, and fellow musicians. He tells the story of how a tennis-playing, music-loving Danish immigrant named Lars Ulrich created a band with singer James Hetfield and made his dreams a reality. Enter Night follows the band through tragedy and triumph, from the bus crash that killed their bassist Cliff Burton in 1986 to the 2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster, and on to their current status as the leaders of the Big Four festival that played to a million fans in Britain and Europe and continues in the U.S. in 2011. Enter Night delves into the various incarnations of the band, and the personalities of all key members, past and present—especially Ulrich and Hetfield—to produce the definitive word on the biggest metal band on the planet.

Through detailed close readings alongside investigations into the history of print culture, Marta Fossati traces the development of the South African short story in English from the late 1920s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. She examines a selection of short stories by important Black South African writers (Rolfes and Herbert Dhlomo, Peter Abrahams, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Ahmed Essop, and Zoë Wicomb) with an alertness to the dialogue between ethics and aesthetics performed by these texts. This new history of Black short fiction problematises and interrogates the often-polarised readings of Black literature in South Africa that can be torn between notions of literariness, protest, and journalism. Due to material constraints, short fiction in South Africa circulated first and foremost through local print media, which Fossati analyses in detail to show the cross-fertilisation between journalism and the short story. While rooted in the South African context, the short stories considered also hold a translocal dimension, allowing us to explore the ethical and aesthetic practice of intertextuality. These are writings that complicate the aesthetics/ethics binary, generic classifications, and the categories of the literary and the political. Theoretically eclectic in its approach, although largely underpinned by a narratological analysis, The South African Short Story in English, 1920-2010: When Aesthetics Meets Ethics offers a fresh perspective on the South African short story in English, spotlighting several hitherto marginalised figures in South African literary studies.

An indispensable map of a classic Zen text. “Mountains and waters are the expression of old buddhas.” So begins “Sansuikyo,” or “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” a masterpiece of poetry and insight from Eihei Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of the Soto school of Zen. Shohaku Okumura—renowned for his translations of and magisterial teachings on Dogen—guides the reader through the rich layers of metaphor and meaning in “Sansuikyo,” which is often thought to be the most beautiful essay in Dogen’s monumental Shobogenzo. His wise and friendly voice shows us the questions Dogen poses and helps us realize what the answers could be. What does it mean for mountains to walk? How are mountains an expression of Buddha’s truth, and how can we learn to hear the deep teachings of river waters? Throughout this luminous volume, we learn how we can live in harmony with nature in respect and gratitude—and awaken to our true nature.

Across a powerfully wide-ranging set of themes, theoretical registers and historical examples, John Roberts analyses the key problems that continue to confront art after conceptual art, in the light of art’s longstanding relationship to market and institution the commodity and mass culture: namely, artistic labour and technology, modernity and the ‘new’, art and negation, identity and subjectivity, agency and audience, form and value. In these terms, the book provides a rigorous and ambitious, examination of the limits and possibilities of art’s contribution to emancipatory discourse and practice.