Every culture and society has read stories in the night sky. From the careful attention of astronomers across all times and all parts of the world to the search for alien life, the stories found in the shapes of constellations to the expansive imaginings of science fiction, there has always been life up there, at the very least, for our imaginations. Mythologies of Outer Space brings together a…
"This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction. Full of astute connections, these livel…
In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature – and modes of literary thinking – as a key resource for such a task.
This short book aims to turn a modest, one might even think trivial, literary labour into something more substantial, going beyond one particular novel into broader questions of novel-writing, character and narrative. My starting point is tracking down those allusions and quotations in Middlemarch that have hitherto gone unidentified by scholars. Most…
The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with 'diaspora studies' evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural prac…
May 2020. As we write this introduction, the covid-19 pandemic has covered the world. Drastic political measures to contain the virus have followed, appearing already belated and inadequate even as they envision a future after the current crisis. With notable national and regional differences, the policies and practices implemented to deal with the spread of the virus act like magnif…
This section gathers nineteenth-century boggart ephemera, particularly from newspapers but also from magazines, rare books and broadsides. Given the space constraints, I concentrate on material that other researchers might have trouble finding. I have typically included here actual boggart news (everything from ‘boggart hunts’ to children dying from boggart stories, sic)…
"Did you hear a single thing Uncle said to you, Sarah? A single damn thing?” Marvin shook his head in exasperation. “Don’t go looking for things unless you want them to find you.” These quotes are extracts from some of the chapters that follow, and they superbly condense what we mean by Living with Mon-sters. There is a fundamental distinction between the monsters you will meet on t…
Ryme is found in verbal arts throughout the world. In the appendix tothis introduction, we offer a partial list of languages whose associated verbal arts sometimes have rhyme.Rhyme is most commonly found in texts which are poems, including sung poems (songs). Poems are dened as texts which are divided into lines, where lines are a sectioning imposed on the oral or written …
his book has its origins in 2015, when the three of us and our colleague Frank Us-beck, having just finished a project on the poetics and politics of narrative, becameincreasingly interested in thinking and theorizing beyond this seemingly ubiqui-tous form. Having focused so much on the well-established category of narrative,we now wanted to divert our attention to artifacts and formations that…
The prose poem, in Poland, is an entity that is –as Le?mian would have it –“incompletely-incarnated,” supposedly described in dictionaries, at times even ephemerally resurrected in some title but, in general, leading a clandestine exis-tence, turned rather towards the past, brooding over its former lives? In any case, there were never very many of them in …
The present study of the Lives of the Poets is designed to show that Johnson’s value judgements about literature lead to ethical literary crit-icism that pertains to human problems affecting our daily life and world crises. In his Dictionary, Johnson defines ethics as “the doctrine of morality; a system of morality.”1 While morality and…
Girls, gender and identity in comicsSugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice offers an innovative, wide-ranging and geographically diverse book-length treatment of girlhood in comics. The various contributing authors and artists provide novel insights into established themes within comics studies, children’s comics, graphic medicine and comics by and about refugees and marginalised ethnic or cultura…
To be an airline passenger in transit is to move through states without permanently adopting them. The very legal nature of a transit lounge embodies this perfectly. When one is in tran-sit, one does not pass through immigration and enter the legal boundaries of a nation-state. The strange nature of transit is best exemplified by its failures — the case of Mehran Karimi Nas…
Luck is all around us.1 There is a certain school of cultural anthropology that is intent on tracking the structures, categories and beliefs that recur across all human societies, transcending the profound differences in history and culture that separate them. This school of ambitious universalists – which is by no mean uncontroversial, both within the field of anthropology…
Meliora is the motto of the University of Rochester. It translates to “ever better.” We have chosen Meliora as the theme of this volume and the title of this section. In the one essay in this section, Carlos Stroud documents how from its very incep-tion The Institute had a mission that was different from that of a usual academic department in a…
The Yagwoia-Angan people, whose selfhood I explore, live in a rugged mountainous region that stretches across the Eastern Highlands, Morobe, and Gulf provinces of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The Yagwoia population is approximately 13,000 in size, and my long-term ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork was primarily with two major groups,…
This Very Short Introduction to Classics links a haunting temple on a lonely mountainside to the glory of ancient Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and to Classics within modern culture-from Jefferson and Byron to Asterix and Ben-Hur. We are all Classicists - we come into touch with the Classics daily: in our culture, politics, medicine, architecture, language, and literature. What are the tr…
It was the summer of 1843, and in Tai County the okra flowers had just bloomed. Lu Yitian’s aunt, Madame Zhou, enjoyed making medi-cal concoctions and people came from all around seeking her treat-ment. There was a man who had been severely scalded, so that his body was covered in festering sores, and no one had been able to affect a cure. He came to beg for …
This book presents a collection of essays discussing a history of the five myths of Dionysus, Narcissus, Prometheus, Marcolf, and Labyrinth in twentieth-century literature. The author traces their transformations against the wider backdrop of Polish and European literature. The book is an excellent, thought-provoking lesson in understanding the signs of contemporary culture and a fascinating jo…
Approaches tomediating and mediated agencywere first developed in responseto Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), which has been booming since the 1990s (La-tour 2005; Blok et al. 2020), leading to subsequent drafts of an emerging“actormedia theory”(Schüttpelz 2013; Krieger and Belliger 2014; Spöhrer and Ochsner2017). Most existing approaches to mediating and mediated agency, despite allinternal d…
The fictional storyteller’s account of the spontaneous generation of authentic myths naturally suitable for children is set alongside the real author’s account of a process of deliberate revision, formulated through rhetorical questions and characterized through metaphors. The myths have to be “purified” through the suppression – which Bright describes …
s this story of the Golden Age develops – with Eustace’s charming descrip-tions of meals growing on trees, carefree fun, and the bright aura – it in fact reveals the sinister myth of Pandora, here a “playfellow” sent by the gods to the boy Epimetheus, in whose household “a great box” menacingly awaits. Even though in Hawthorne’s version the girl is not responsible for…
As the first study of manuscript collections, this book asks what changes when sayings, stories, songs, and spells are brought together on the same carrier. Covering a plethora of manuscripts from the Warring States and early empires, and spanning sources from philosophy, historiography, poetry, and technical literature, this study describes the whole life-cycle of multiple texts collected on a…
Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive and cast-off child over 150 years of Latinx/Chicanx literature as a critique of colonial modernity and the forms of confinement that underpin racialized citizenship.
The biographic series presents and entirely new way of looking at the lives of the world's greatest thinkers and creatives. It takes the 50 defining facts, dates, thoughts, habits, and achievements of each subject, and uses infographics to convey all of them in vivid snapshots.
You have been given a tremendous gift, rooted in God's desire to know you personally. It is called prayer. Prayer is God's invitation for you to enter into his presence with confidence, to hand Him all your hurts, needs, and worries. Pray is God's antidote to the toxins of fear, cynicism, skepticism, and self-centeredness that swirl around us.
This book is about storytellers and their oral performances of folktales in Mayotte, an island lying in the Indian Ocean about 1,000 miles east of the African coast. The book is built on a constraint: I have not witnessed the performances I discuss; in fact I have never been to Mayotte. Within that constraint, I indulge a whim. I use books by three French ethnographers …
eveloping the analogy between the laws of nature and stage machinery—also known as the merveilleux—Pluche elects to remain in the audience, subject to the illusion, rather than venture backstage in order to determine how the special effects are achieved.3 This acknowledgment of the implicit limitations of reason and the senses, subsequently dubbed epistemological modesty, left open the ques…
What is it like to write poetry right now at this moment in world history? What is it unlike? Or, to avoid comparisons at all, what is poetry now? Fascists and an “alt-right” search for platforms, opposed but not often enough; global warming renders laugh-able our comfortable and anachronistic sense of cyclical change; secular stagnation mocks the entire program of austerity; a fra…
Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly…
The founder of Hera the Light of Women, Mrs. Marianela Mirpuri told me about her idea to have a Poetry Anthology and challenged me to write and coordinate the first anthology for Hera the Light of Women. My first feelings where if I should be able to do it and thank her for trusting me. Then doubts came into my spirit, as I was not used, since long time to write in English (besides Hera’s hym…
Since the stories told by poets and other early writers represented the major evidence for the events for which the Greeks had no written records, historians could not escape considering the role of myth in history. One approach—represented here by Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ analyses of the Trojan, Persian, and Peloponnesian Wars—was to seek to distinguish where myth left off and histor…
Before entering upon the many strange beliefs of the ancient Greeks, and the extraordinary number of gods they worshipped, we must first consider what kind of beings these divinities were. In appearance, the gods were supposed to resemble mortals, whom, however, they far surpassed in beauty, grandeur, and strength; they were also more commanding in statue, height being considered by the Greeks …
Coconut leaves on towering trees lining the shore were swaying in a gentle sea breeze, as if waving at a flock of birds that flew over the ocean back to their nests on the cliff. Slowly but surely, the afternoon sun went down the horizon. The light scattered and tinged the sky orange on that late afternoon. The beautiful sunset only added to the joy of a little girl who was busy chasing after…
How wonderful is the creation of God. A small island, which is like a little piece of heaven on earth with the soaring mountains and clear, blue expanse of the sea, such was the nature’s landscape of the exceptionally beautiful Banda Island, a small island which lies in the southeastern side of Ambon Islands, Molucca. Once upon a time, there lived a married couple on the Island of Banda. Th…
Once upon a time, there was a great kingdom surrounded by hills and jungles. It was Azamnawi Kingdom. Its royal palace was adorned with glittering apparatus and the rooms were splendid. The King’s name was Azam. He was a famous king. King Azam was a strong and fearsome adversary. He was benevolent and revered. King Azam had a son named King Keinderaan. He was well-built, tall, valiant and h…
In a village called Wanua Uner, lived a pair of husband and wife, Pontohroring and Mamalauan, respectively. They had been married for a long time, but they had not got any children. Despite their old age, they still had a hope that one day they would get children. “What are you doing, dear?” Pontohroring asked his wife, Mamalauan, one afternoon. “Oh.... Look at this! I’m making a shir…
It was a fine day. The sun shone brightly and the sea water was blue and clear. The white sands on the beach were greeted by the rolling waves, whose sound mixed with the cries of the seagulls. It was such a beautiful scene. However, the group of men could not enjoy such beauty. They were busy felling coconut trees and cutting mangroves. They did not fell randomly; instead, they selected onl…
On a fine morning, as the winds blew softly touching the leaves and the colourful flowers in the garden at Kadipaten (a region ruled by an adipati) Surabaya, some flowers were red, some yellow, and some others white, increasing the beauty and coolness of the garden, the cheerful voices of the princess and her maids could be heard from a distance. That fine morning, they were busy making crow…
This is the graceful land they speak of, the land surrounded by a vast and clear, turquoise ocean. The sands are yellowish white like shiny pearls under the sun light, with the sea waves gently breaking on the shore. On one side of the island is a stretching ridge of towering rocks, while the other side is a lush mangrove forest, home to spawning crabs and fish. Along the coast, windswept co…
The amber glow of twilight dimmed as it bade farewell to the dusk, ushering the coming of night. Leaves were bowed and limp, as if exhausted from having spent the day in the company of the sun. The birds had stopped chirping, retiring one after the other to their nests. Once in a while the flapping of bat wings could be heard as they flew over the house where Sasandewini and Suntre lived. The…
It was almost dusk, and the sun had just greeted the western horizon. Buffaloes and cows over the dried rice paddies were approaching a hamlet in the Priangan realm. Shepherds played merrily in the vast rice paddies. The squeal and the moos of the buffaloes and cows described the serenity and peace of the village. Smoke puffed from the roofs of the houses that looked like a giant’s cigaret…
Jaka Prabangkara was the son of the King of Majapahit, Prabu Brawijaya V, born to a commoner. The king had met Prabangkara’s mother when he was in disguise as a commoner in order to know the lives of his subjects beyond the palace’s walls. When he was disguised in commoner outfit, he was accompanied by his two most loyal aides, Semut and Gatel. After some tour to inspect the real situation …
There was once a kingdom in the depth of a forest named the Jungle Kingdom. It was inhabited by all creatures but the human beings. Despite the fact that it had been inhabited by beasts and plants, the inhabitants acted as though they were human. Though each kind of animals had its own king, the highest power of the kingdom was invested in their Supreme Ruler, King Mouse-deer.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a kingdom in Babolo ruled by King Babolo. The King lived with his wife and they had a pair of boy and girl. The elder, the boy, was named Madianggalang, and the younger, was named Vulangnembua. King Babolo was very much revered by his people for his just leadership. King Babolo cared about his people so much. If he found out his people were sick or…
Once upon a time, in Kampung Timbulon, there was an old woman who lived in a small shack. The shack was made of wooden boards and roofed with palm leaves. There were only guest room, bed room and a very cramped space one might call kitchen. The lawn of the shack was adorned by various kinds of colourful flowers. Tall trees grew next to the shack. Between those trees grew feral grass. From th…
There was once a boy named Ijo who lived with his grandmother, Nana Tupu, in Kampung Tanjung Babia, Mandar Pattae. When he was five, his parents set off for the Island of Borneo, leaving him behind. Ijo was much too young to remember any of it and he had never once asked Nana Tupu about his parents’ whereabouts. Though it was usually just the two of them, Ijo was never lonely. And neither was…
The wounded swordsman collapsed and stared up at the sky. His eyes always accidently met with the white clouds that looked like sitting cross-legged, with a wide blue background that stretched out. No breeze dared to move the position of the cotton white objects. The nature was silent. Between the blurred vision and the unfailing consciousness, Serunting's eyes saw the clouds resembling the h…
On the west coast of Biak Island there was a village called Sopen. The people lived in harmony and peace. To maintain their survival, every day they worked in the garden. Behind Kampung Sopen there were three towering mountains called Mount Yamnaibori, Sunbiyabo, and Manswarbori by the local people. In Yamnaibori Mountain lived a young man named Yawi Nusyado. He was very handsome and his bod…