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In the era of what Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker call “post-theory,” presenting us with theory that is exhausted due to an ever-increasing difficulty in coming up with any clear-cut categorizations, Salman Rushdie’s prolific, multifarious oeuvre epitomizes contemporary literature’s incessant tendency to evade classifications. Being in between cultures, traditions, genres, conventions and influences, Rushdie’s work, often described as hybrid and cosmopolitan, can and should be read from a variety of perspectives. In a time when we are questioning the appropriateness of terms such as “postcolonial” and wondering if more general ones, such as “transnational,” “transcultural,” or “international,” would be better suited for today’s literature, this article analyzes Rushdie’s fiction between categories as gradually swerving away from postcolonial postmodernism toward cosmopolitanism, with special focus onThe Ground beneath Her Feet, in an attempt to address and answer the controversial question of whether we are indeed moving toward a global(ized) literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses the example of the Chinese tree peony, a flower much desired by British gardeners at the start of the nineteenth century as well as a flower much reproduced in horticultural periodicals and on consumer commodities, to explain the era's interconnected understanding of the process of cultivation. Organic cultivations, foreign and domestic, were not separated from social and personal cultivations in verbal and visual discourse but rather mutually reinforced each other. Following these connections helps explain the ever-growing estrangement between nineteenth-century subjects and the nature that surrounded them in terms that connect environmental, aesthetic, and literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An overview and classification of new book publishing formats in Russia is presented along with analysis of the key tendencies and cultural implications of these new formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise untilJourney’s Endand the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For many of us, the mention of Tom Thumb immediately conjures up the image of the jaunty little boy no bigger than a thumb that we remember from our childhood storybooks. But it is less likely that we recall his story, and, if we do, it is probably a variation based the Brothers Grimm iteration of the tale, which became increasingly ubiquitous throughout the twentieth century as it was featured in the Little Golden Books and taken up by Disney. The Grimms transcribed the tale sometime around 1810, but the story is much older than that, and the older the version we look at the more interesting it becomes; Tom Thumb was greatly transformed as it traversed the gap between the 1600s and 1810, and between London and Germany. Let me first offer a condensed synopsis of the earliest complete version of the story I could find, from seventeenth-century London; it is probably a story that you do not know, and one I'm sure will make you merry, just as Tom's chronicler claimed in 1621. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a contextualized analysis of the representation of alcohol in British war literature published between 1915 and 1930. It examines the domestic debates surrounding alcohol pre-war, as well as the controversial history of the rum ration, before providing a taxonomy of alcohol's representation in a range of literature in which it features significantly in both its official and unofficial forms. The literature consulted includes examples of the early popular wave of fiction, and the later wave of disillusionment literature, as it came to be known. Following this thematic examination of the representation of alcohol in war texts, the concluding discussion argues that the patterns in the representation of alcohol across this 15-year period can themselves be interpreted contextually, economically and politically, as a progressive intervention in a wider debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The growing numbers of women journalists entering the profession in the early twentieth century provoked mixed reactions from contemporary novelists. Responses evolved from cheering on a doughty pioneer to questioning whether women's presence in the mass print media was helping reform the status of women or reinforcing gender stereotypes. Little is known about the personal struggles of women journalists in the early years of the popular press. In the absence of plentiful data, the study of novels and short stories, many of them semi-autobiographical and written by men and women working in the early twentieth-century newspaper industry, combined with analysis of previously un-studied memoirs and early guides for women journalists, illuminate the obstacles—and opportunities—experienced by these pioneers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A flurry of scholarly interest in Burmese legal history occurred between 1882 and 1885. Before 1882 it had been assumed that Burma had its own distinctive, Buddhist, legal tradition. A new theory was announced: that Burmese Law was a late offshoot of the Sanskrit legal literature typified by Manusmrti. I shall argue that the new theory was not supported by persuasive evidence. The new theory, I suggest, partook less of scholarship and more of propaganda in support of the annexation of Upper Burma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]