This book aims to provide new insights into the complexities of theorizing contemporary adolescent literacies. It proposes a theoretical approach to understanding youth cultural production which addresses several lacunae in the field of new literacy research. Through a series of examinations of youth -writing- both inside and outside of school, the book builds an approach to the study of contemporary youth expression that draws on the theoretical and methodological insights of cultural studies. The voices of youth are central, and both the content and form of what they have to say ground the...

Nation, Race & History in Asian American Literature reflects on the symbolic processes through which the United States constitutes its subjects as citizens, connecting such processes to the global dynamics of empire building and a suppressed history of American imperialism. Through a comparative analysis of David Henry Hwang s M. Butterfly, Lois-Ann Yamanaka s Blu s Hanging, and Jessica Hagedorn s Dogeaters, this study considers the ways in which bodies challenge the categories asserted in nation-building. The book proposes that underwritten by the vast histories...

This interdisciplinary collection of essays advances the study of anagnorisis (-recognition-), a quintessential concept in Aristotelian poetics. This book explores narrative structure and epistemology by examining how anagnorisis works in narrative fiction, music, and film. Contributors hail from the fields of cinema; opera; religion; medieval and modern English, German, and French literatures; comparative literature; and Indian (Sanskrit) and Islamic (Arabic) literatures, both classical and modern."

The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett s Own Way to Make Use of It expands upon the ideas and theories set forth in the author s Die eigentlich metaphysische Tatigkeit: Uber Schopenhauers Asthetik und ihre Anwendung durch Samuel Beckett, published (in German) in 1982 and hailed by Catharina Wulf in her book The Imperative of Narration (1997) as an -excellent study- and -the most thorough enquiry into Beckett and Schopenhauer.-
In the last years of the twentieth century, new documents regarding Samuel Beckett s...

The nineteenth century saw a fundamental change in the practice and psychology of shopping with the appearance of the department store: La Samaritaine in Paris (1869), Macy s in New York (1858) and Harrods in London (1849) were early representations of Western consumer culture. The Sentiment of Spending examines this shift first on a socio-historic level and then through the literary lens of some of the century s most vital authors, the exponents of Naturalism Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Jori-Karl Huysmans as well as the fascinating, if rarely studied, Rachilde. In the works...

Marriage as Political Strategy and Cultural Expression is the first comprehensive study of Mongolian royal marriages from World Empire (1206-1279) to the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) in Asia. This study examines the Mongolian royal family s marriage strategies and the political implications of these royal marriages, specifically, the intermarriages between the Mongolian royal house and its allies, including the Onggirat, the Oirat, and other Mongol peoples as well as the Uighur State and Korea in Central and East Asia. This book concludes that the short lifespans of Mongol royalty after...

Recent years have seen amateur personal stories, focusing on me, flourish on social networking sites and in digital storytelling workshops. The resulting digital stories could be called mediatized stories. This book deals with these self-representational stories, aiming to understand the transformations in the age-old practice of storytelling that have become possible with the new, digital media. Its approach is interdisciplinary, exploring how the mediation or mediatization processes of digital storytelling can be grasped and offering a sociological perspective of media studies and a...

Antigone s Daughters presents various readings of the classical myth of Antigone as interpreted through modern feminist and psychoanalytic literary theories. Topics such as femininity, education, and establishing selfhood amidst the restrictions of the patriarchal society presented by Sophocles provide the foundation for the modern novel. This study serves as a model for the comparative interpretation of literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including the writings of George Sand (Indiana), Karolina Pavlova (A Double Life), Nikolai Chernyshevsky (What...

Body Knowledge and Curriculum examines student understandings of body knowledge in the context of creating and interrogating visual art and culture. It illustrates a six-month research study conducted in an alternative secondary school in a large urban city. During the research project, students created a number of visual art works using a diversity of material explorations as a means to think through the body as a process of exchange and as a bodied encounter. The book engages with feminist theories of touch and inter-embodiment, questioning the materiality and lived experiences of...

Leslie Marmon Silko s Ceremony: The Recovery of Tradition is a study of the embedded texts that function as the formal and thematic backbone of Leslie Marmon Silko s 1977 novel. Robert M. Nelson identifies the Keresan and Navajo ethnographic pretexts that Silko reappropriates and analyzes the many ways these texts relate to the surrounding prose narrative."