Thinking with the Familiar in Contemporary Literature and Culture 'Out of the Ordinary'


Book Description

What grows out of the ordinary? This volume focuses on that which has been regarded as ordinary and formulaic in literary and cultural phenomena and contests the hegemonic logic of revealing oppression and rebuilding liberation in contemporary critical theory.




Arrivals and Departures


Book Description

This book explores the human relationship to changing biodiversity by bringing together multidisciplinary insights into human-nature relations from the humanities. New animal and plant species arrive and previously existing ones may disappear. However, the historical and social perspectives of the changes have been understudied so far. This book approaches the human relationship with changing biodiversity from three different angles: belonging and non-belonging, emotions, and environmental policy. The question of belonging and non-belonging is crucial when it comes to changing biodiversity. The authors ask who decides where species can move and live and when invasive becomes native. Similarly, emotions have a big role in human-nature relations. The book shows why we grieve the loss of some species and hate some other species, and how our emotions change over time. The writers also aim to show how environmental policies, or the practice of governing species, are affected by societal discussion, emotions, scientific research, and topical concepts as well as how these policies shape biodiversity and our perceptions of different species. The authors provide fresh insights into human-nature relations and explain why we need multidisciplinary approaches in order to fully understand their complexity.




Powerful Prose


Book Description

What makes a reading experience »powerful«? This volume brings together literary scholars, linguists, and empirical researchers who tackle the question by investigating the effects and reader responses generated by selected extracts of literary prose. The twelve contributions theorize this widely-used, but to date insufficiently studied notion, and provide insights into the therefore still mysterious-seeming power of literary fiction. The collection explores a variety of stylistic as well as readerly and psychological features responsible for short- and long-term effects - topics of great interest to those interested or specialized in literary studies and narratology, (cognitive) stylistics, empirical literary studies and reader response theory.




Engagements with Hybridity in Literature


Book Description

Engagements with Hybridity in Literature: An Introduction is a textbook especially for undergraduate and graduate students of literature. It discusses the different dimensions of the notion of hybridity in theory and practice, introducing the use and relevance of the concept in literary studies. As a structured and up-to-date source for both instructors and learners, it provides a fascinating selection of materials and approaches. The book examines the concept of hybridity, offers a historical overview of the term and its critique, and draws upon the key ideas, trends, and voices in the field. It critically engages with the theoretical, intellectual, and literary discussions of the concept from the time of colonialism to the postmodern era and beyond. The book enables students to develop critical thinking through engaging them in case studies addressing a diverse selection of literary texts from various genres and cultures that open up new perspectives and opportunities for analysis. Each chapter offers a specific theoretical background and close readings of hybridity in literary texts. To improve the students’ analytical skills and knowledge of hybridity, each chapter includes relevant tasks, questions, and additional reference materials.




Figurations of Peripheries Through Arts and Visual Studies


Book Description

This edited volume breaks new ground for understanding peripheries and peripherality by providing a multidisciplinary cross-exposure through a collection of chapters and visual essays by researchers and artists. The book is a collection of approaches from several disciplines where the spatial, conceptual, and theoretical hierarchies and biased assumptions of ‘peripheries’ are challenged. Chapters provide a diverse collection of viewpoints, analyses, and provocations on ‘peripherality’ through bringing together international specialists to discuss the socio-political, aesthetic, artistic, ethical, and legal implications of ‘peripheral approach.’ The aim is to illuminate the existing, hidden, often incommensurable, and controversial margins in the society at large from equal, ethical, and empathic perspectives. The book is designed to assist established researchers, academics, and students across disciplines who wish to incorporate novel, arts and practice-based research and critical approaches in their research projects, artwork, and academic writing. Providing both a consolidated understanding of the peripheries, visual studies, and artistic research as they are and setting expansive and new research insights and practices, this book is essential reading for scholars of arts and humanities, visual culture, art history, design, philosophy, and cultural studies.




Decolonising Social Work in Finland


Book Description

Introduction and Chapter 10 available open access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book examines the contemporary social care realities and practices of Finland, a small nation with a history enmeshed in social relations as both coloniser and colonised. Decolonising Social Work in Finland: · Interrogates coloniality, racialisation and diversity in the context of Finnish social work and social care. · Brings together racialised and mainstream White Finnish researchers, activists and community members to challenge relations of epistemic violence on racialised populations in Finland. · Critically unpacks colonial views of care and wellbeing. It will be essential reading for international scholars and students in the fields of Social Work, Sociology, Indigenous Studies, Health Sciences, Social Sciences and Education.




Arrivals and Departures


Book Description




Salman Rushdie in Context


Book Description

Salman Rushdie in Context discusses Rushdie's life and work in the context of the multiple geographies he has inhabited and the wider socio-cultural contexts in which his writing is emerging, published and read. This book reveals the evolving political trajectory around transnationalism, multiculturalism and its discontents, so prominently engaged with by Salman Rushdie in relation to South Asia, its diasporas, Britain, and the USA in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Focused on the aesthetic, biographical, cultural, creative, historical and literary contexts of his works, the book reveals his deep engagement with processes of decolonization, emergent nationalisms in South Asia, Europe and the USA, and diasporic identity constructions and how they have been affected by globalisation. The book traces how, through his fiction and non-fiction, Rushdie has profoundly shaped the discussion of important questions of global citizenship and migration that continue to resonate today.




The Funambulists


Book Description

The Funambulists brings together the diverse poetry collections of six contemporary Arab diasporic women poets. Spanning multiple languages and regions, this volume illuminates the distinct artistic voice of each poet, yet also highlights the aesthetic and political relevance that unites their work. Marchi explores the work of Naomi Shihab Nye, a celebrated American poet of Palestinian descent; Iman Mersal, an Egyptian poet living in Edmonton, Canada, who writes in Arabic; Nadine Ltaif, a Lebanese poet who lives in Quebec and has adopted French as her language; Maram al-Massri, a Syrian poet writing in Arabic and living in France; Suheir Hammad, an American poet of Palestinian origin; and Mina Boulhanna, a Moroccan poet living in Italy and writing in Italian. Despite their varying geographical and political backgrounds, these poets find common ground in themes of injustice, spirituality, gender, race, and class. Drawing upon the concept of tension, Marchi examines both the breaking points and the creative energies that traverse the poetic works of these writers. These celebrated funambulists use their art of balance and flexibility bolstered by their courage and transgression to walk a tightrope stretched out across cultures, faiths, and nations.




Land Deep in Time


Book Description

This volume brings together a group of most highly acclaimed Canadian writers and distinguished international experts on Canadian literature to discuss what potential Janice Kulyk Keefer's concept of "historiographic ethnofiction" has for ethnic writing in Canada. The collection builds upon Kulyk Keefer's idea but also moves beyond it by discussing such realms of the concept as its ethics and aesthetics, multiple and multilayered sites, generic intersections, and diasporic (con-)texts. Thus, focusing on Canadian historiographic ethnofiction, "Land Deep in Time" is the first study to define and explore a type of writing which maintains a marked presence in Canadian literature but has not yet been recognized as a separately identifiable genre.