The poet of the Odyssey was a seriously flawed genius. He had a wonderfully inventive imagination, a gift for pictorial detail and for introducing naturalistic elements into epic dialogue, and a grand architectural plan for the poem. He was also a slapdash artist, often copying verses from the Iliad or from himself without close attention to their suitability. With various possible ways of telling the story bubbling up in his mind, he creates a... more...

Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the complex interdisciplinary body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism takes as its premise that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the rich work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer... more...

This Vintage Classics edition of James Joyce’s groundbreaking story collection has been authoritatively edited by scholars Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and includes a chronology, bibliography, and afterword by John S. Kelly. Also included in a special appendix are the original versions of three of the stories as well as Joyce's long-suppressed preface to Dubliners.   With the fifteen stories in Dubliners Joyce reinvented the art of... more...

Postmodernism is an important part of the cultural landscape which continues to evolve, yet the ideas and theories surrounding the subject can be diverse and difficult to understand. Fifty Postmodern Thinkers critically examines the work of fifty of the most important theorists within the postmodern movement who have defined and shaped the field, bringing together their key ideas in an accessible format. Drawing on figures from a wide... more...

Discussing the work of more than 60 poets from the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean, from Sujata Bhatt to M. Philip NourbeSe and from John Ashbery to Eliot Weinberger, Nerys Williams guides students through the key ideas and movements in the study of poetry today. With reference to original manifestos and web-based experiments, as well as the role of information culture in shaping and distributing poetry globally this book... more...

Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism develops the theoretical perspective of environmental posthumanism through analyses of acclaimed science fiction novels by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Jeff VanderMeer, in which the human species suddenly transforms in response to new or changing environments. Narrating dramatic ecological events of human-to-nonhuman encounter,... more...

Lesbians and gays have gone from "coming out," to "acting up," to "outing," meanwhile radically redefining society's views on sexuality and gender. The essays in Inside/Out employ a variety of approaches (psychoanalysis, deconstruction, semiotics, and discourse theory) to investigate representations of sex and sexual difference in literature, film, video, music, and photography. Engaging the figures of divas, dykes, vampires and queens, the... more...

The exploration of the direct experience of healing and of the divine through the witnessing of movement becoming conscious. • Uses sample sessions and descriptive theory to explain the discipline. • Based on the author's 35 years of movement work. Offering from the Conscious Body reveals both the theory and practice of a unique body-based process that is cathartic, creative, healing, and mystical--as presented by Janet Adler, the presiding... more...

Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real proposes writing as a mathematical and logical operation to build a bridge between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Samuel Beckett's prose works. Arka Chattopadhyay studies aspects such as the fundamental operational logic of a text, use of mathematical forms like geometry and arithmetic, the human obsession with counting, the moving body as an act of writing and love, and sexuality... more...

Of all the many biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, none has presented the twenty-sixth president as he saw himself: as a man of letters. This fascinating account traces Roosevelt’s lifelong engagement with books and discusses his writings from childhood journals to his final editorial, finished just hours before his death. His most famous book, The Rough Riders―part memoir, part war adventure―barely begins to suggest the dynamism... more...