Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals renders a vivid portrait of the intergenerational and intersectional dialogue between influential feminist writers on how to say no to the conditions of oppression, exclusion, and exploitation imposed by patriarchal and systemically racist capitalist societies. The book provides today’s readers and writers access to the powerful inventory of concepts and techniques that two generations of feminists have assembled for refusing domination and constituting fugitive forms of sociability and writing. Drawing on examples from feminist thinkers, Audre Lorde, Carla Lonzi, Hélène Cixous, Hortense Spillers, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anne Boyer and Simone White, the book focuses on how the power dynamics of recognition tie the uses of language to the material conditions of discrimination in everyday life.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the diverse relationships between the frequently ignored and inherently ambiguous hinterlands and their manifestations in literature and culture. Moving away from perspectives that emphasize the marginality of hinterlands and present them as devoid of agency and “cultural currency”, this collection assembles a series of original essays using various modes of engagement to reconceptualize hinterlands and highlight their semiotic complexity. Apart from providing a reassessment of hinterlands in terms of their geocultural significance, this book also explores hinterlands through such concepts as nostalgia, heterotopia, identity formation, habitation, and cognitive mapping, with reference to a wide geographical field. Literary and filmic revisions of familiar hinterlands, such as the Australian outback, Alberta prairie, and Arizona desert, are juxtaposed in this volume with representations of such little-known European hinterlands as Lower Silesia and Ukraine, and the complicated political dimension of First World War internment camps is investigated with regard to Kapuskasing (Ontario). Rural China and the Sussex Downs are examined here as writers’ retreats. Inner-city hinterlands in Haiti, India, Morocco, and urban New Jersey take on new meaning when contrasted with the vast hinterlands of megacities like Johannesburg and Los Angeles. The spectrum of diverse approaches to hinterlands helps to reinforce their multilayered and multivocal nature as spaces that defy clear categorization.

This book aims to study the Batman narrative, or Bat-narrative, from the point of view of its nodal relationship to modern narrative. To this end, it offers for the first time a new type of methodology adequate to the object, which delves both into materials scarcely studied in this context and well-known materials seen in a new light. This is a multidisciplinary work aimed at both the specialist and the global reader, bringing together comic studies, philosophical criticism, and literary criticism in a debate on the fate of our current global civilization.

The “intangible power” of literature, which, in Umberto Eco’s words, “allows us to travel through a textual labyrinth (be it an entire encyclopaedia or the complete works of William Shakespeare) without necessarily ‘unravelling’ all the information it contains”, may be clearly identifiable in our contemporary age of intertextuality and, most importantly, of interdisciplinarity. It suffices to think of the countless film adaptations of Shakespeare’s works, or of the popular appeal of Dan Brown’s global bestsellers, the so-called Robert Langdon book series, which has made original (and contentious) use of literary and artistic masterpieces such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. What is more, the investigation of literature’s verbality through the lenses of cinematic and media perspectives has greatly benefitted from scholarly insights into dialogism, heteroglossia, polyphony, and historiophoty, opening new aural and visual windows of interpretation and knowledge. With these considerations in mind, this book explores the enduring presence of some of the most revolutionary early modern voices and works in our contemporary time. It embraces a rich diversity of literary genres (from poetry to storytelling, novels, fairy tales, and historical colonial chronicles, while also considering musical theatre compositions), and broadens the scope of research to the world of media, with cutting edge insights into contemporary films, TV series, and videogames. It presents innovative scholarly perspectives on how early modern works and themes are explored, remediated and refashioned today to address cultural, political, and social issues germane to our global moment.

This book examines the imperial spectacles and startling reversals of fortune related in William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), and investigates how these accounts inspired fictional adaptations by George A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and George Griffith. The revision of history in the Amerindian adventure both entertained young transatlantic audiences and was a vehicle to attract tourism and investment in countries such as Mexico and Peru. Henty, Haggard, and Griffith, moreover, used their tales of adventure as a platform to impart British values to their readers. Such values compel the characters and narrators of the novels discussed to act as cultural mediators, to acquire indigenous languages and adopt native ways of being, and, in several of the romance adventures under consideration, to marry Mexican or Incan noblewomen. Part I, Conquest, examines George Henty’s By Right of Conquest: Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1891), H. Rider Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), and George Griffith’s Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (1898). Part II, Reclamation, argues that English re-writings of history work to eclipse the Spanish in Haggard’s Virgin the Sun (1922), Henty’s Treasure of the Incas (1902) and Griffith’s Romance of Golden Star (1897).

This book seeks to unfold the complexity within the works of Dambudzo Marechera and presents scholars and readers with a way of reading his works in light of utopian thinking. Writing during a traumatic transitional period in Zimbabwe’s history, Marechera witnessed the upheavals caused by different parties battling for power in the nation. Aware of the fact that all institutionalized narratives – whether they originated from the colonial governance of the UK, Ian Smith’s white minority regime, or Zimbabwe’s revolutionary parties – appeal to visions of a utopian society but reveal themselves to be fiction, Marechera imagined a unique utopia. For Marechera, utopia is not a static entity but a moment of perpetual change. He rethinks utopia by phrasing it as an ongoing event that ceaselessly contests institutionalized narratives of the postcolonial self and its relationship to society. Marechera writes towards a vision of an alternative future for the country. Yet, it is a vision that does not constitute a fully rounded sense of utopia. Being cautious about the world and the operation of power upon the people, rather than imposing his own utopian ideals, Marechera chooses instead to destabilize the narrative constitution of the self in relation to society in order to turn towards a truly radical utopian thinking that empowers the individual.

'Time travels in divers paces with divers people.' Shakespeare’s oft-quoted line contains a hidden ambiguity: not only do individual people experience time differently, but time travels in diverse paces when we are with diverse persons. The line articulates a contemporary understanding of subjective time: it is changed by interaction with our social environment. Interacting with other people—and even literary characters—can slow or quicken the experience of time. Interactive time, and the paradigm of enactive cognition in which it sits, calls for an expansion of traditional ideas of time in narrative. The first book-length study of interactive time in narrative, Catching Time explains how lived time and narrative time interpenetrate each other, so that the relational model of subjective time acts as a narrative function. Catching Time develops a novel, interdisciplinary framework, drawing on cognitive science, narratology, and linguistics, to understand the patterns of temporality that shape narrative.

Representations of language learning and literacy, also known as “literacy narratives” are a staple of literature. They tell stories of conflict that illuminate the sociocultural dynamics whereby we learn to speak, read, and write. Yet, they tend to be read as stories about the “powers” of language and literacy – the power to make someone “human”, to form identity, and improve one’s social status. This book introduces the “literacy narrative approach”, a methodology for the study of literacy narratives that accounts for the conflict that pervades them. It achieves this by focussing on how the texts represent the interactions between writing and other semiotic modes (multimodality). Sitting at the interface between theory and practice, it provides three practical applications of the literacy narrative approach and, in the process, develops a theoretical perspective for thinking about language learning, literacy, and communication as they are practised in the real world.

Feminist criticism has come a long way in the last twenty years. Its development has been rapid, its snowball progress picking up elements of structuralism, deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism; just as rapidly it has been shedding its own early theories and methodologies. Now it is a critical orthodoxy with its own established canonical texts. Now is the time, then, to begin to question that orthodoxy. In Problems for Feminist Criticism five women critics seek to do that, in a spirit of enquiry whose central point of focus is the literature for which feminist critics have offered a re-reading. By reference to a wide range of writers, from Milton to the contemporary poet, with a strong emphasis on the nineteenth-century novel, the contributors ask what we may be losing from literature by adopting the feminist orthodoxy. Each chapter provides a survey of feminist critical approaches to its subject and highlights the inherent problems. The book frees the way forward for critics who have found much that is stimulating and revealing in feminist approaches to literature, but who find its proscriptiveness potentially reductive. It shows how literature may have the flexibility to absorb and benefit from new critical approaches, whilst still retaining its own life, never quite to be contained in criticism's theories and methodologies.

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