Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Theatre, Margins and Politics
This book interrogates the relationship of theatre and the dialectics of centre and the margins. It looks into the exciting world of performance to examine how theatre as an art form is perfectly placed to both perform and critique complex relations of power, politics, and culture. The volume looks into how drama has historically served as a stage for expressing and showcasing prevalent social, historical, and cultural contexts from which it has emerged or intends to critique. Including a wide range of performative practices like Dalit Theatre, Australian Aboriginal theatre, Western realism, and Yoruba theatre, it explores varied lived experiences of people, and voices of subversion, subalternity, resistance, and transformation. The book scrutinises the strategies of representation enunciated through textuality, theatricality, and performance in these works and the politics they are inextricably linked with. This book will be of interest and use to scholars, researchers, and students of theatre and performance studies, postcolonial studies, race and inequality studies, gender studies, and culture studies.
Literature and Theory
Literature and Theory is designed to assist students to apply key critical theories to literary texts. Focusing on representative works and authors widely taught across classrooms in the world – Joyce, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Beckett, Eliot, and Octavia Butler – it picks up different aspects of studying literature in an accessible format. The volume also brings together chapters that represent major modern literary schools of thought, including structuralism, poststructuralism, myth criticism, queer theory, feminism, postcolonialism, and deconstruction. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and critical theory, as well as culture studies.
Commanding Words
In a twenty-first century which celebrates freedom and equality while also beginning to question the lax attitudes and methods which have triumphed since the late Sixties, reflecting on the concept of authority is as necessary as ever. What role does, and should, authority play in political, social, and academic organization? Should one plead for stricter or more flexible authority? Where does the frontier between authority and authoritarianism lie? In examining these, and other related questions, this volume, postulating the interconnectedness between authority and discourse, also discusses the rhetorical strategies whereby authority is constructed, manifested, and resisted. Pertaining to subjects as various as politics, culture, literature, history, and pedagogy, the twenty chapters which constitute this book offer an interdisciplinary, yet thematically coherent, coverage of the question under discussion, and encompass a wide historical and spatial scope, which ranges from the Islamic Middle Ages to twenty-first century America, passing through nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, India, and North Africa on the way.
Japanese Horror Culture
Contemporary Japanese horror is deeply rooted in the folklore of its culture, with fairy tales-like ghost stories embedded deeply into the social, cultural, and religious fabric. Ever since the emergence of the J-horror phenomenon in the late 1990s with the opening and critical success of films such as Hideo Nakata's The Ring (Ringu, 1998) or Takashi Miike's Audition (Ôdishon, 1999), Japanese horror has been a staple of both film studies and Western culture. Scholars and fans alike throughout the world have been keen to observe and analyze the popularity and roots of the phenomenon that took the horror scene by storm, producing a corpus of cultural artefacts that still resonate today. Furth...
Queering Visual Cultures
The contemporary popular cultural space has leveraged the queer in the same format of representation as its presentation in the 1990s. Although the queer is portrayed in a less perverse light than a decade ago, popular cultural representations of the queer in the visual culture genres are still on the level of the banal. While popular culture has become more encouraging towards the queer, the broader cultural opinion about the queer has been progressively more skeptical, compromised by the idea that the queer is encroaching on spaces reserved exclusively for heteronormative recreation. The essays in this volume look closely at how the queer is portrayed across media and throughout the world.
Contemporary Women's Fiction. Feminist Narratives in Selected Twentieth Century Women's Novels
Women’s writing in the twentieth century has shown a dramatic shift in its preoccupations and intentions. Rather than occupying itself with the trivialities of the social and domestic spheres, the writing by women in the latter half of the twentieth century and approaching the twenty-first century inheres concerns such as political, historical, questions of gender equity and rights, interrogations of normative and patriarchal practices and other such issues that have not been adequately addressed in women’s writing thus far. The four essays in the present volume are certainly not exhaustive or adequate in this regard — that of addressing this lacuna in literary scholarship — but it m...
Japanese Horror Culture
Contemporary Japanese horror is deeply rooted in the folklore of its culture, with fairy tales-like ghost stories embedded deeply into the social, cultural, and religious fabric. Ever since the emergence of the J-horror phenomenon in the late 1990s with the opening and critical success of films such as Hideo Nakata’s The Ring (Ringu, 1998) or Takashi Miike’s Audition (Ôdishon, 1999), Japanese horror has been a staple of both film studies and Western culture. Scholars and fans alike throughout the world have been keen to observe and analyze the popularity and roots of the phenomenon that took the horror scene by storm, producing a corpus of cultural artefacts that still resonate today. F...
The City Speaks
This book studies the significance and representation of the ‘city’ in the writings of Indian poets, graphic novelists, and dramatists. It demonstrates how cities give birth to social images, perspectives, and complexities, and explores the ways in which cities and the characters in Indian literature coexist to form a larger literary framework of interpretations. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of Western urban thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Diane Levy, as well as South Asian thinkers such as Ashis Nandy, Arjun Appadurai, Vinay Lal, and Ravi Sundaram, the book projects against a seemingly monolithic and homogenous Western qualification of urban literatures and offers a truly unique and contentious presentation of Indian literature. Unfolding the urban-literary landscape of India, the volume lays the groundwork for an urban studies approach to Indian literature. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, especially Indian writing in English, urban studies, and South Asian studies.
The Ethics of Horror
The Ethics of Horror: Spectral Alterity in Twenty-First Century Horror Film examines the theme of spectral haunting in contemporary American horror cinema through the lens of ethical responsibility. Arguing that moral obligation can manifest as terror to the complacent self, the text extracts this dimension of ethics in twenty-first century horror films. Drawing on the ethical theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which posit the asymmetrical obligation of the self to the other, Michael Burke highlights how recent horror films portray spectral antagonists as ethical others that hound protagonists and summon them to an accountability that they can neither evade nor ever completely fulfill. Burke observes the resulting destabilization of notions of ethical responsibility and justice in a variety of contemporary horror subgenres, including technohorror, haunted house and zombie films.
New Women's Writing
The uptake of women’s writing as a distinct genre in literature since the 1960s has been rapid and multifarious. This development has fuelled a generation of literary and cultural studies, and can be seen in the growing influence of women’s and gender studies even in literary studies programs. The study of women’s writing has alerted literature to crucial social, political and cultural problems with which the discipline must continue to grapple. New Women’s Writing addresses this legacy and reflects upon the following questions: What is a critical history of women’s writing? How has women’s writing challenged literature’s rigid disciplinary construction? How can we derive a distinct philosophy of women’s writing and literary studies? How does an engagement with women’s writing contribute to a literary understanding of the complex politics of literature? This book is designed to interest both the seasoned scholar of women’s writing, as well as fledgling scholars who wish to grapple with the broad concept of women’s writing and its manifestations in the twentieth century and thereafter.
