Staging Subversions: The Performance-within-a-Play in French Classical Theater defines a new type of metadrama using Le Tartuffe as its paradigm and explores the complex, ambiguous, and enlightening relationships that metadrama maintains with the social and political orders. While metadramatic scenes are most often concerned with theater itself, the performance-within-a-play adopts an important function in the play's plot, and, consequently, in the social world of the play. The performance-within-a-play is particularly associated by the classical playwrights with the family structure, with the class system, with women's social roles, and with the politics of absolutism.

From Swift's repulsive shit-flinging Yahoos to Beckett's dying but never quite dead moribunds, Irish literature has long been perceived as being synonymous with subversion and all forms of subversiveness. But what constitutes a subversive text or a subversive writer in twenty-first-century Ireland? The essays in this volume set out to redefine and rethink the subversive potential of modern Irish literature. Crossing three central genres, one common denominator running through these essays whether dealing with canonical writers like Yeats, Beckett and Flann O'Brien, or lesser known contemporary writers like Sebastian Barry or Robert McLiam Wilson, is the continual questioning of Irish identity - Irishness - going from its colonial paradigm and stereotype of the subaltern in MacGill, to its uneasy implications for gender representation in the contemporary novel and the contemporary drama. A subsidiary theme inextricably linked to the identity problematic is that of exile and its radical heritage for all Irish writing irrespective of its different genres. Sub-Versions offers a cross-cultural and trans-national response to the expanding interest in Irish and postcolonial studies by bringing together specialists from different national cultures and scholarly contexts - Ireland, Britain, France and Central Europe. The order of the essays is by genre. This study is aimed both at the general literary reader and anyone particularly interested in Irish Studies.

Rosa Montero is one of several prominent journalists and writers of fiction who have emerged in post-Franco Spain. This book focuses on Montero's prose fiction written between 1983 and 1993, the «second stage» in the gradual transformation of her artistic development. It explores the innovative strategies used by Montero to interrogate the social construction of identity and to expose the underpinnings of hierarchical power. Relying on a variety of subgenres, ranging from romance to murder mystery to speculative fiction/fantasy, Montero's work constitutes a synergetic exploitation of the conventions of journalism as well as other popular and literary modes. The resulting eclectic, subversive narrative, informed by ambiguity and experimentation, provides a blatant critique of patriarchal tradition and Francoist ideology.

Brings 'new formalist' approaches to Chaucer, focusing on formal agency, bodies, disability, ethics, poetics, reception, and scale.

"Examines the wide-ranging influence of games and play on the development of modern art in the twentieth century"--Provided by publisher.

The current Western economical crisis will only deepen. To understand this, you have to take a look at what is behind the normally seen scenes of capitalism, communism and even democracy itself. The book includes real life examples from today`s Finland, USA and France that support the concept of the book, which is the ideological groundwork for the new Western Alternative. Enter the 21st century revolution

Smuggling as Subversion is the first comprehensive account of the opium industry in western India during the colonial period, from its beginnings to the mid-19th century. This is an in-depth examination of the use of opium during colonial times, and at the same time the fascinating story of how Indian merchants developed a smuggling enterprise that subverted the East India Company's monopoly in the drug, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the first Opium War in China.