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For over a century, the intellectual debate of scholars from African descent has been dominated by the idea of double consciousness spearheaded by W.E.B. DuBois. Interestingly, with many years of vexatious issues of the encounter between the West and Africa, many scholars approached the debate on the basis of the consciousness of the Self and the Other. However, this idea seems to overlook the multiplicities of being black/white. Reading Multiple Consciousness: Exploring the Complexity of Postmodern Identity suggests a different approach to the issue by taking more steps beyond double consciousness. It enriches the debate over race literature and colonization as it offers another way of reading texts. This book proposes that the complexity of postmodern identity is more accurately described by a theory of multiple consciousness. This study arises out of the necessity of a more nuanced theoretical framework for a younger generation of researchers on both sides of the Atlantic, a conceptual approach that does justice to the complexity of their experience.

From Homer's Odyssey itself, the return of the veteran to his or her home has been a central trope of the literary canon. Huge bureaucracies and a panoply of global organisations are deeply concerned with facilitating a painless return to stable homes. This book presents ‘homecoming'as an analytical lens to better understand veterans'return and reintegration after conflict. Home is held to be multidimensional, a concept encapsulating the physical and the social, particularly disrupted by experiences of violence. Homecoming is, therefore, not a mere moment but a process that can unfold over years and decades as old and new bonds of familiarity are forged. Struggles over the home and homecoming are, moreover, endlessly political, bound up in questions of identity and the nation. Looking across times, places, and disciplines, the collection centres both historical and representational approaches to veterancy.

Relocation narratives form a distinct subgenre of contemporary travel memoirs concerned with the experiences of travellers who become settlers in foreign locales and narrate their experience of cultural accommodation in serial autobiographical accounts. This book seeks to understand the discourse of identity/alterity in relocation writing, which focuses on the topos of everyday life from a transnational perspective, one which embraces a cosmopolitan orientation of openness to cultural difference. Focusing on three transnational writers in Italy and their respective relocation trilogies – Frances Mayes's Tuscan memoirs, Annie Hawes's Ligurian memoirs, and Tim Parks's Verona memoirs – the study examines the sustained engagement with place and place-based practices given narrative voice through multipart works which trace the authors'migrating identities. These nonfiction accounts contribute to a broader polyphonic literature in which transnational writers give voice to personal stories shaped by intercultural experiences which provide a powerful localised lens to examine how identities are dialogically transformed through contact with difference in a globalised world. By giving readers an opportunity to reflect on identity and diversity in local/global contexts, transnational literature contributes to a better understanding of cultural change in late modernity and provides an important space for critical, creative, and transcultural exchange.

On the Very Edge: Bidentities in Michelle Cliff's Fiction uses the life and work of bisexual, biracial, and bicultural author Michelle Cliff (1946–2016) to develop an entirely new approach to intersectional cultural, race, and gender/sexuality studies that prioritizes “bi-ness” as a methodological tool. The book focuses not “simply” on bisexuality, biracialism, or biculturalism as isolated identity concepts; rather, it explores the very nature of these intersectional identity categories as configured by Cliff. The text, therefore, represents a reclamation of bi identity in Cliff's work as a much broader cultural, and not just sexual or racial, category, arguing that Cliff's spaces and/or stages of “bi-ness” are in themselves significant in understanding contemporary global identity politics, as well as in navigating complex and often damaging identity constructs.Michelle Cliff, partnered with poet Adrienne Rich and “passing” as white, had an often-invisible sexuality and cultural identity. Yet her acclaimed work—Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, Bodies of Water, If I Could Write This in Fire, Free Enterprise, and others—demonstrates the intersections between bisexuality, biracialism, and biculturalism in often profound ways. Drawing on original research, interviews, diaries, editorials, and other correspondences, On the Very Edge will have far-reaching implications in the understanding of complex Caribbean identity politics and intersectional race, gender, and sexuality studies at large.

This book provides an in-depth analysis and critical examination of the representation of ethnic, sexual, cultural, and individual identities in selected literary works by contemporary writers from Northeast India.The book explores the complex dynamics of identity construction, sexuality, marginalisation, ethnicity, and belonging in the context of Meghalaya and Northeast India as a whole. The author analyses poetry and prose by Janice Pariat, Anjum Hasan, Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih, and other Khasi writers. These works candidly portray the turmoil afflicting contemporary Meghalaya – from insurgency and ethnic tensions to ecological threats and loss of roots as well as reconciliation, integration, and mutual understanding. Using postmodern and postcolonial literary strategies, the book depicts fluid, heterogeneous, and multifaceted notions of identity in Northeast India. An exploration of ethnicity, belonging, and unbelonging in the Northeastern context, this book presents marginalised voices and liminal spaces. It will be of interest to academics focusing on Indian English literature, postcolonial literature, and South Asian Studies.

This updated, new edition of this book explores the emergence of what the author terms'late modernist freakish aesthetics'– a creative fusion of'high'and'low'themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about'freaks'by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the dysteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about'freaks'defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.

This book explores the dynamic intersections where cultures, languages and spaces converge, shaping identities and creating new forms of expression. The authors attempt to unravel the complexity of narrative and imaginative spaces by examining cultural identities in global contexts. The essays on literary representations consider abstract border crossings through rewriting and reappropriation in various genres, while also looking at immigrant fiction, post-Ant.

This book looks at Neobaroque Latin American fiction, poetry, essay and performance from the 1970s to the early 2000s in order to explore the cultural hybridization and transgressive identity transformations at play in these works. It shows how the ornamental style and boldly experimental techniques are an effective strategy in presenting decentered identities in sexually ambiguous, multiethnic, interracial, transcultural, and mutant characters, as well as in metafictional narrators and authors. In this way, the book demonstrates the potential of Neobaroque works to destabilize normative, essentialist and binary categories of identity. The study focuses on Latin America as a cultural macroregion, drawing on examples from a variety of countries, including Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and the US-Mexican border. Drawing on gender, queer, trans and Chicana feminist theory, it argues for an alternative approach to a model of the Self, or a theory of selfhood, derived from the exuberant style and experimental techniques of the Neobaroque.

This book contributes to the interdisciplinary take on Jewish American literature through the exploration of a connection between humour and identity. Initially inspired by a love for Jewish humour and literature, the author selects works by three contemporary Jewish American writers that may appear humorous at first glance. However, an exploration into the social functions of humour reveals more serious undertones in these literary works. Despite the word'humour'in the title, this book is not about entertainment; it is a serious investigation into the strategic use of humour in identity formation within Jewish American literature. The book navigates the complexities of defining Jewish American literature, offering a fresh perspective that connects Jewish identity and humour. This thought-provoking journey challenges traditional boundaries, examining the profound relationship between humour and the construction of Jewish identity in the diverse landscape of contemporary Jewish American literature.

This book offers the first systematic, up-to-date, cross-cultural, and detailed study of “semi-volitional bodily behaviour” (sneezing, spitting, coughing, burping, vomiting, defecating, etc.) in the classical world.Examining verse and prose texts, fragments, and scholia from the age of Homer to the second century AD, the central argument put forward in this volume is that semi-volitional bodily acts have the potential to betray individual or collective (ethnic/civic and cultural) identities centred on a variety of different themes. Discussions specifically focus on the following five aspects of the interplay between semi-volitional body language and identity construction: sexuality and gender; the link between sexuality and socioeconomic identity of individuals or groups; the embodied markers of civic/ethnic and cultural collectives and the contrast between “we-ness” and “otherness”; ēthos and emotions; and how dietary habits and illnesses indicate the “somo-psychosocial” identity of individuals or groups. The book offers a comprehensive understanding of representations of the human body in ancient Greece and Rome, while reopening the complex and fascinating discussion about the relationship between intention, mind, body, and identity.This book offers a fascinating study suitable for students and scholars of classics and ancient Greek and Roman history. It is also of interest to those in a variety of other disciplines, including body culture studies, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies, as well as sociology, anthropology, cognitive medicine, and the history of medicine.

American Modernist Fiction: Psychoanalytic Recitations of Identity addresses five American Modernist novels in light of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory: Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Kay Boyle's Process, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Thornton Wilder's The Cabala, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Dolis's dynamic readings constitute a spirited'performance'of the narrative, deploying his own innovative form of literary analysis, what he calls'performance criticism'. These psychoanalytic studies simultaneously stage the narrative and re-enact its putative significance, provoke and question its intent, thereby establishing a dialectics of desire—what both affects the body of the narrative and, equally, the critic's subjectivity.

In Women's Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire, the author examines how writers captured various experiences of living under imperialism in their fiction and nonfiction works. Through an examination of texts by writers producing in different parts of the empire (including the Japanese metropole and the colonies and territories of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchukuo), the book explores how women negotiated the social and personal changes brought about by modernization of the social institutions of education, marriage, family, and labor. Looking at works by writers including young students in Manchukuo, Japanese writer Hani Motoko, Korean writer Chang Tŏk-cho, and Taiwanese writer Yang Ch'ien-Ho, the book sheds light upon how the act and product of writing became a site for women to articulate their hopes and desires while also processing sociopolitical expectations. The author argues that women used their practice of writing to construct their sense of self. The book ultimately shows us how the words we write make us who we are.

The book Us & Them: Women Writers'Discourses on Foreignness analyses the contingent nature of the constructions of foreignness in Ireland and Galicia. On the basis of various comparable circumstances in both communities —migration flows, increasingly multicultural societies, constant renegotiations of national identity, and the growing visibility of women in the public sphere— this book traces the multiple ways in which gender is intertwined with foreignness. Focusing on literary works published since the 1980s the author presents contemporary women writers'new insights into cultural difference.

Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance responds to the growing concern to make Shakespeare Studies inclusive of prospective students, teachers, performers, and audiences who have occupied a historically marginalized position in relation to Shakespeare's poetry and plays. This timely collection includes essays by leading and emerging scholarly voices concerned to open interest and participation in Shakespeare to wider appreciation and use. The essays discuss topics ranging from ethically-informed pedagogy to discussions of public partnerships, from accessible theater for people with disabilities to the use of Shakespeare in technical and community colleges. Inclusive Shakespeares contributes to national conversations about the role of literature in the larger project of inclusion, using Shakespeare Studies as the medium to critically examine interactions between personal identity and academia at large.

This book aims to provide a detailed study of young adult fiction concentrating on Mexican teenage (im)migrants to the United States and their search for identity. In its quest to define young adult (im)migration literature as a genre, the first chapter combines and questions classifications provided by literary scholars and educational scientists. The second chapter explores crucial factors which impact the protagonists'transcultural identity construction. The third chapter engages in theory mixing: Louise Rosenblatt's reader-response theory, the critical literacy approach of the New London Group, influences from the field of cultural studies and a model of literary competences are merged into an innovative theoretical framework that forms the basis of the teaching sequence presented.

Traditional histories of Black letters in Latin America have delimited their geographic scope to the Caribbean while also omitting intertwined Afro-Indigenous discourses. Inspired by the legacy of Amefrican thinker Lélia Gonzalez, Améfrica in Letters highlights the Black poets, songwriters, novelists, essayists, and bloggers who have created a counter-multiculturalist literary history on the Latin American mainland. To capture a sense of the variety of their contributions, this book spans Mexico, Central America, the Andes, and the Southern Cone—highlighting the transcontinental nature of the legacy of Black writing and its impact beyond national boundaries. The writers examined in the volume engage with regional intellectual frameworks while putting into circulation a demand for a recalibration of the Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts in which they and other Afrodescendants reside.

Across four parts of exploratory, creative and speculative essays, this book provides provocative frameworks and readings of canonical and non-canonical literature. The essays cover off-the-map places, warped historical chronologies, excessive selves, unlikely meetings and systemic incommensurability. Collectively they define original methods, categories and terrains for the study of the American cultural past. Altogether, this collection interrogates some of the most dominant critical moves of the past two decades and proposes alternative ways of working and thinking with the American nineteenth century.

Comparative Postcolonialism in the Works of V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison: Fragmented Identities begins with an overview of its theoretical framework, highlighting the intersectional relationship between postcolonial literature and comparative literature. Tracing selected novels by Naipaul and Morrison, the book takes, as a starting point, Fanon's three-phase journey of the decolonizing process. In the first phase of mimicry, Naipaul's and Morrison's earlier novels represent the assimilation of indigenous people into dominant hegemonic cultures. The second phase is envisioned as the re-narration or re-interpretation of the past and old legends of indigenous culture. Morrison succeeds in asserting that her ancestors'past is the only way to celebrate a cultural identity, but Naipaul tends to criticize and neglect his past and his original, indigenous culture. The third phase marks the emergence of a revolutionary literature, in which Naipaul and Morrison guide their people to hybridity as a new way of becoming and resisting the hegemonic dichotomies in dominant societies.

This book analyses diasporic literatures written in Indian languages written by authors living outside their homeland and contextualize the understanding of migration and migrant identities.Examining diasporic literature produced in Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Indian Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Marathi, and Tamil, the book argues that writers in the diaspora who choose to write in their vernacular languages attempt to retain their native language, for they believe that the loss of the language would lead to the loss of their culture. The author answers seminal questions including: How are these writers different from mainstream Indian writers who write in English? Themes and issues that could be compared to or contrasted with the diasporic literatures written in English are also explored.The book offers a significant examination of the nature and dynamics of the multilingual Indian society and culture, and its global readership. It is the first book on Indian diasporic literature in Indian and transnational languages, and a pioneering contribution to the field. The book will be of interest to academics in the field of South Asian Studies, South Asian literature, Asian literature, diaspora and literary studies.

This study addresses the question of artistic identity and the myth of the artist as it has been shaped by the artists themselves. While the term artist is to be understood in a broad sense, the focus of this study is the literature of the Romantic tradition. Identity is largely perceived as a construct, and a central hypothesis of this book concerns its aesthetic value and the ways it creates dominant narratives of self-perception that produce powerful myths.The construction of the artist's identity, be it collective or personal, rests on a series of aesthetic praxes. Caught between the mythic idealisation of poetic genius and its social devaluation, the Romantic artist seeks to create a place for himself, and in doing so, he engages in his own mythmaking. This process is studied in an interdisciplinary perspective, approaching texts and writers from different traditions. The study analyses various typologies of the artist, numerous mythmaking strategies as well as several postural techniques; all of which have sketched major direct or indirect fictional self-portraits in the European tradition.

This book outlines how the protagonists in The Nibelung's Ring, The Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones attempt to construct identities and expand their consciousness manifestations. As the characters in the three works face the ends of their respective worlds, they must find answers to their mortality, and to the threat it implies: the loss of identity and consciousness. Moreover, it details how this process is depicted performatively. In a hands-on and interdisciplinary approach, this book seeks to unveil the underlying philosophical concepts of identity and consciousness in the three works as they are represented audio-visually on stage and screen. Through the use of many practical examples, this book offers both academic scholars and any interested readers a completely new perspective on three enduringly popular and interrelated works.

Exzessive Gewaltdarstellungen in der heutigen Kunst haben ihren Ursprung in einem autonomieästhetischen Programm der Moderne, das es erst möglich macht, Gewalt zu ästhetisieren. In der Prosa Jung-Wiens kristallisieren sich um 1900 die unterschiedlichen kunstästhetischen Diskurse auch an bisher wenig erforschten Szenen der Gewalt heraus. Anhand verschiedener Texte der Jung-Wiener Autoren Schnitzler, Salten, Beer-Hofmann und Bahr geht André Reichart der Frage nach, ob die Gewalt als ausschließlich selbstreflexive ästhetische Darstellung existieren kann.

Contributions by Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Kathleen Kellett, Andrew McInnes, Joyce McPherson, Rebecca Mills, Cristina Rivera, Wendy Rountree, Danielle Russell, Anah-Jayne Samuelson, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Andrew Trevarrow, and Richardine Woodall Home. School. Nature. The spaces children occupy, both physically and imaginatively, are never neutral. Instead, they carry social, cultural, and political histories that impose—or attempt to impose—behavioral expectations. Moreover, the spaces identified with childhood reflect and reveal adult expectations of where children “belong.” The essays in Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children's Literature explore the multifaceted and dynamic nature of space, as well as the relationship between space and identity in children's literature. Contributors to the volume address such questions as: What is the nature of that relationship? What happens to the spaces associated with childhood over time? How do children conceptualize and lay claim to their own spaces? The book features essays on popular and lesser-known children's fiction from North America and Great Britain, including works like The Hate U Give, His Dark Materials, The Giver quartet, and Shadowshaper. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach in their analysis, contributors draw upon varied scholarly areas such as philosophy, race, class, and gender studies, among others. Without reducing the issues to any singular theory or perspective, each piece provides insight into specific treatments of space in specific periods of time, thereby affording scholars a greater appreciation of the diverse spatial patterns in children's literature.

Die Frage nach Identität ist in französischsprachigen Literaturen und Filmen aus dem Maghreb ein zentrales Thema. Aufgrund ihres Entstehungskontextes, der von der Kolonialisierung durch Frankreich geprägt ist, hinterfragen sie oftmals essentialistische Vorstellungen von Identität. Dabei fokussieren sie nicht nur kulturelle, sondern vor allem auch geschlechterspezifische Differenzen. Madeleine Löning analysiert am Beispiel eines Romans von Abdellah Taïa und eines Spielfilms von Nadia El Fani die Dekonstruktion von Identität in französischsprachigen Gegenwartskulturen des Maghreb. Im Vordergrund stehen die Kategorien Gender, Kultur und Klasse sowie ihre intersektionalen Wechselwirkungen.

This book discusses how American literary modernism and postmodernism interconnect memory and identity and if, and how, the intertwining of memory and identity has been related to the dominant socio-cultural trends in the United States or the specific historical contexts in the world. The book's opening chapter is the interrogation of the narrator's memories of Jay Gatsby and his life in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The second chapter shows how in William Faulkner's Light in August memory impacts the search for identities in the storylines of the characters. The third chapter discusses the correlation between memory, self, and culture in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. Discussing Robert Coover's Gerald's Party, the fourth chapter reveals that memory and identity are contextualized and that cognitive processes, including memory, are grounded in the body's interaction with the environment, featuring dehumanized characters, whose identities appear as role-plays. The subsequent chapter is the analysis of how Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated deals with the heritage of Holocaust memories and postmemories. The last chapter focuses on Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, the reconstructive nature of memory, and the politics and production of identity in Southeastern Europe.

Enormous social changes during the Victorian era inspired some of the finest novels in the English language. In the final decades of the century, rigid application of gender rules and class hierarchies began to relax. Consciousness of the injustice of class- and gender-based discrimination was growing. Meanwhile, bias against nonwhite peoples was worsening. The British used scientific racism to justify their relentless expansion in Africa and Asia. Viewing Victorian literature through the lens of these social changes gives the modern reader a fresh way to interpret the novels and to appreciate their relevance to contemporary issues. Nineteenth-century novelists deployed realism, satire, and the bildungsroman to resist or support leading ideologies of their time, including the separate spheres doctrine and British supremacism. Each chapter is an elaboration of the author's university lectures about Victorian classics. The tone is scholarly yet conversational, directed to the undergraduate student as well as the general reader or Victoriaphile. The text presents concepts in interdisciplinary cultural studies, discusses the uses of genre for rhetorical and social purposes, and exposes paradoxes of the era. The coherent style, abundant examples, discussion questions, and literary glossary make this book a valuable supplement for readers of the Victorian novel.

Global Identities in Transit: The Ethics and Politics of Representation in World Literatures and Cultures explores the myriad aspects of identity formation and identity representation in an increasingly globalized world. Covering a variety of cultural and historical experiences in addition to several texts of world literatures, the contributors discuss the configurations of transnationality and transculturality in our postcolonial and globalized world. Acknowledging that nationality, ethnicity, gender, and class are continually shaped by historical processes, the contributors hone in on the ways that the increase in mobility via migration, diaspora, and exile render identities always in transit In the face of structural inequalities and social injustices predominant in this context, the chapters reflect on the moral obligations of representation. This collection will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature.

A look at how ideas of translation, migration, and displacement are embedded in the works of prominent artists, from Ovid to Tacita DeanOn Belonging and Not Belonging provides a sophisticated exploration of how themes of translation, migration, and displacement shape an astonishing range of artistic works. From the possibilities and limitations of translation addressed by Jhumpa Lahiri and David Malouf to the effects of shifting borders in the writings of Eugenio Montale, W. G. Sebald, Colm Tóibín, and many others, esteemed literary critic Mary Jacobus looks at the ways novelists, poets, photographers, and filmmakers revise narratives of language, identity, and exile. Jacobus's attentive readings of texts and images seek to answer the question: What does it mean to identify as—or with—an outsider?Walls and border-crossings, nomadic wanderings and Alpine walking, the urge to travel and the yearning for home—Jacobus braids together such threads in disparate times and geographies. She plumbs the experiences of Ovid in exile, Frankenstein's outcast Being, Elizabeth Bishop in Nova Scotia and Brazil, Walter Benjamin's Berlin childhood, and Sophocles's Antigone in the wilderness. Throughout, Jacobus trains her eye on issues of transformation and translocation; the traumas of partings, journeys, and returns; and confrontations with memory and the past.Focusing on human conditions both modern and timeless, On Belonging and Not Belonging offers a unique consideration of inclusion and exclusion in our world.

La tragédie de l'Holocauste surgit dans les oeuvres de Romain Gary, Georges Perec et Patrick Modiano sous la forme d'une interrogation tourmentée des origines. Pourtant, ils abordent ces thèmes chacun d'une manière singulière, en raison d'un vécu historique différent : celui de héros de la Résistance pour Gary, d'« enfant caché » pour Perec et de « fils de collabo » pour Modiano. Identité et mémoire se rejoignent ainsi dans des récits qui mettent continuellement en jeu les pierres angulaires du moi, se reconstruisant et se déconstruisant, sans jamais se définir de façon définitive. En ce sens, le ressassement identitaire des trois auteurs peut être lu dans la réécriture d'une série de motifs autobiographiques, d'origine traumatique, mais aussi en relation avec la création d'une posture d'auteur, d'un nom d'auteur et d'un corpus littéraire, jouant sur les notes d'une variation esthétique essentielle.

Explores the dimensions of the coming-of-age novel in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Brazil, focusing on works by eight major Afro-Latin American writersThe centuries-old European genre of the coming-of-age story has been transformed by contemporary Afro-Latin American novelists to address key aspects of the diaspora in various nations of the Caribbean and Latin America. While attention to Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Brazilian literature has increased in recent decades, few critics have focused specifically on the Afro-Latin American Bildungsroman, and fewer still have addressed novels from both Spanish- and Brazilian-speaking regions, as author Bonnie Wasserman does in this study.The memory and continuing impact of slavery especially shape these coming-of-age stories. Often interwoven with race is a focus on religion, particularly the importance of African folk religions and traditions in the lives of young people. Immigration-and the return journey-is another important theme in the novels.Coming of Age in the Afro-Latin American Novel discusses works&emdash;all published around the turn of the 21st century&emdash;by such important writers as Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa and Mayra Santos-Febres (from Puerto Rico), Conceição Evaristo and Paulo Lins (from Brazil); Teresa Cardenas and Pedro Pérez Sarduy (from Cuba); and Junot Diaz and Rita Indiana (from the Dominican Republic). Wasserman's far-reaching analysis is both rigorous and compassionate, shedding a clear light on ways in which descendants of Africans have experienced life in the New World.

This volume brings together scholars, students and writers as well as artists from around the world. By choosing a thematic focus on'transition'in women's lives, we present research on women who have crossed biological, geopolitical and political borders as well as emotional, sexual, cultural and linguistic boundaries. The international approach brings together different cultures and genres in order to emphasize the links and connections that bind women together, rather than those which separate them. The chapters consider the ways in which the changes and transitions women undergo influence the world we live in. We are particularly interested in the idea of crossing borders and how this influences identity and belonging, and the theme of crossing boundaries in the context of motherhood as well as sexual orientation. The topic is timely given the waves of migration all around the world in recent times. The contributors deal with issues central to contemporary life, such as gender equality and women's empowerment, as well as understanding women's identities and being sensitive to fluid concepts of gender and sexuality.

This book examines literary representations of mainlander identity articulated by Taiwan's second-generation mainlander writers, who share the common feature of emotional ambivalence between Taiwan and China.Closely analyzing literary narratives of Chinese civil war migrants and their descendants in Taiwan, a group referred to as'mainlanders'(waishengren), this book demonstrates that these Chinese migrants'ideas of'China'and'Chineseness'have adapted through time with their gradual settlement in the host land. Drawing upon theories of Sinophone Studies and memory studies, this book argues that during the three decades in which Taiwan moved away from the Kuomintang's authoritarian rule to a democratic society, mainlander identity was narrated as a transformation from a diasporic Chinese identity to a more fluid and elusive Sinophone identity. Characterized by the features of cultural hybridity and emotional in-betweenness, mainlander identity in the eight works explored contests the existing Sinocentric discourse of Chineseness. An important contribution to the current research on Taiwan's identity politics, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, Chinese migration, and Taiwanese literature as well as Chinese literature in general.

Disorienting Empire is the first book to examine Republican Latin poetry's recurring interest in characters who become lost. Basil Dufallo explains the prevalence of this theme with reference to the rapid expansion of Rome's empire in the Middle and Late Republic. It was both a threatening and an enticing prospect, Dufallo argues, to imagine the ever-widening spaces of Roman power as a place where one could become disoriented, both in terms of geographical wandering and in a more abstract sense connected with identity and identification, especially as it concerned gender and sexuality. Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and Catullus, as well as the'triumviral'Horace of Satires, book 1, all reveal an interest in such experiences, particularly in relation to journeys into the Greek world from which these writers drew their source material. Fragmentary authors such as Naevius, Ennius, and Lucilius, as well as prose historians including Polybius and Livy, add depth and context to the discussion. Setting the Republican poets in dialogue with queer theory and postcolonial theory, Dufallo brings to light both anxieties latent in the theme and the exuberance it suggests over new creative possibilities opened up by reorienting oneself toward new horizons, new identifications-by discovering with pleasure that one could be other than one thought. Further, in showing that the Republican poets had been experimenting with such techniques for generations before the Augustan Age, Disorienting Empire offers its close readings as a means of interpreting afresh Aeneas'wandering journey in Vergil's Aeneid.

This book offers an extensive analysis of Woolf's engagement with science. It demonstrates that science is integral to the construction of identity in Woolf's novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and identifies a little-explored source for Woolf's scientific knowledge: BBC scientific radio broadcasts. By analyzing this unstudied primary material, it traces the application of scientific concepts to questions of identity and highlights a single concept that is shared across multiple disciplines in the modernist period: the idea that modern science undermined individualized conceptions of the self. It broadens our understanding of the relationship between modernism and radio, modernism and science, and demonstrates the importance of science to Woolf's later novels.

Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is the first book to examine Ruskin's writing on theater. In works as celebrated as Modern Painters and obscure as Love's Meinie, Ruskin uses his voracious attendance at the theater to illustrate points about social justice, aesthetic practice, and epistemology. Opera, Shakespeare, pantomime, French comedies, juggling acts, and dance prompt his fascination with performed identities that cross boundaries of gender, race, nation, and species. These theatrical examples also reveal the primacy of performance to his understanding of science and education. In addition to Ruskin on theater, Performing the Victorian interprets recent theater portraying Ruskin (The Invention of Love, The Countess, the opera Modern Painters) as merely a Victorian prude or pedophile against which contemporary culture defines itself. These theatrical depictions may be compared to concurrent plays about Ruskin's friend and student Oscar Wilde (Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Judas Kiss). Like Ruskin, Wilde is misrepresented on the fin-de-millennial stage, in his case anachronistically as an icon of homosexual identity. These recent characterizations offer a set of static identity labels that constrain contemporary audiences more rigidly than the mercurial selves conjured in the prose of either Ruskin or Wilde.

In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.

Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women's Literature brings together a series of essays addressing black women's fragmented identities and quests for wholeness. The individual essays concern culturally specific experiences of blacks in select African countries, England, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. They examine identity struggles by establishing the Middle Passage as the first site of identity rupture and the subsequent break from cultural and historical moorings. In most cases, the authors themselves have migrated from their places of origin to new spaces that present challenges. Their narratives replicate the displacement engendered by their own experiences of living with the complexities of diasporic existence. Their female characters, many of whom participate in multiple border crossings, work to define themselves within a hostile environment. In nearly every essay, the female characters struggle against multiple yokes of oppression, giving voice to what it means to be black, female, poor, old, and alone. The subjects'migrations and journeys are analyzed as attempts to heal the “displacement,” both physical and psychological, that results from dislocation and relocation from the homeland, imagined variously as Africa. This volume reveals that black women across the globe share a common ground fraught with struggles, but the narratives bear out that these women are not easily divided and that they stand upon each other's shoulders dispensing healing balms. Black women's history and herstory commingle; the trauma that ensued when Africans were loaded onto ships in chains continues to haunt black women, and men, too, wherever they find themselves in this present moment of the Diaspora.

This book explores the dilemma of Bond's'two selves'and his existential search for an identity. This exploration, analysed across six chapters, is informed by a variety of postcolonial, historical, informational and critical texts on Bond and Anglo-Indians. Arup Pal focuses on four key literary works of Bond-The Room on the Roof, A Flight of Pigeons, Scenes from a Writer's Life and A Handful of Nuts-from the perspective of the author's developing sense of personal, national and cultural identity. He traces the journey that the author and his protagonists embark on in order to seek and ultimately define their sense of being.

A brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature invites us to contemplate profound questions about the human experience by focusing on some of the best-known characters in literature—from how Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway copes with the inexorability of midlife disappointment to Ruth's embodiment of adolescent rebellion in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. “So beautiful... a fantastic book.” —Zadie Smith, best-selling author of White TeethIn supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual professions, Josh Cohen explores a new way for us to understand ourselves. He helps us see what Lewis Carroll's Alice and Harper Lee's Scout Finch can teach us about childhood. He delineates the mysteries of education as depicted in Jane Eyre and as seen through the eyes of Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. He discusses the need for adolescent rebellion as embodied in John Grimes in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and in Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. He makes clear what Goethe's Young Werther and Sally Rooney's Frances have—and don't have—in common as they experience first love; how Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke deals with the vicissitudes of marriage. Vis-a-vis old age and death, Cohen considers what wisdom we may glean from John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and from Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard.Featuring: • Alice—Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass • Scout Finch—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird • Jane Eyre—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre • John Grimes—James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain • Ruth—Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go • Vladimir Petrovitch—Ivan Turgenev, First Love • Frances—Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends • Jay Gatsby—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby • Esther Greenwood—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar • Clarissa Dalloway—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway • And more!

In recent years, cognitive and affective science have become increasingly important for interpretation and explanation in the social sciences and humanities. However, little of this work has addressed American literature, and virtually none has treated national identity formation in influential works since the Civil War. In this book, Hogan develops his earlier cognitive and affective analyses of national identity, further exploring the ways in which such identity is integrated with cross-culturally recurring patterns in story structure. Hogan examines how authors imagined American identity—understood as universal, democratic egalitarianism—in the face of the nation's clear and often brutal inequalities of race, sex, and sexuality, exploring the complex and often ambivalent treatment of American identity in works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Eugene O'Neill, Lillian Hellman, Djuna Barnes, Amiri Baraka, Margaret Atwood, N. Scott Momaday, Spike Lee, Leslie Marmon Silko, Tony Kushner, and Heidi Schreck.