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Place-Ing The Prison Officer - The 'Warder' In The British Literary And Cultural Imagination

by Cornelia Wachter

170,93€ + 10% CARD

 The sadistic prison 'warder' is an all-too-familiar figure in the literary and cultural imagination of Britain and beyond. This distorted image continues to be informed by the stereotypically oppressive gaolers of old - trailing the figurative stench of the dungeon behind them. Even today, prison officers can, for instance, function as scapegoats to compensate for society's guilty conscience or as fictional vehicles to promote prison reform. This book seeks to redress this misrepresentation of the prison officer by drawing attention to counter-discursive examples: deploying and developing spatial and cognitive narratological frameworks, it examines prison literature that lends a voice to prison officers and/or grants them a complex fictional representation. A review of traditional depictions of 'warders' in classics of prison literature prepares the ground for the discussion of contemporary prison officer memoirs and the representation of officers in fictional works by Brendan Behan, Allan Guthrie and Louise Dean.
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Sea Change - The Shore From Shakespeare To Banville

by Christoph Singer

147,08€ + 10% CARD

 The shore defies definition. The shore deconstructs and rebuilds, is the beginning or end of a journey, initiates or stops mobility. Here survivors of shipwrecks, like Robinson Crusoe, escape their death; and the weary and tired, like Max Morden, wade back into the womb of nature. The shore is transformation spatialized. Still the coast as literary setting is more than a decorative space. Its utopian/dystopian nature, its liminality and ambiguity invite transgressions of various kinds, which undermine any notion of stable and fixed borders and boundaries. The littoral is liminal, a third space that contests and deconstructs epistemic certainties. This study illustrates this paradigmatic nature of shorelines from William Shakespeare's The Tempest to John Banville's The Sea.
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Page And Place - Ongoing Compositions Of Plot

by Jon Anderson

164,30€ + 10% CARD

 If people are geographical beings, what can fiction tell us about this truth? This book explores how literature can help us understand the nature of the relations between people and place, how humans create connections between their identities and their geographies, and how these can be threatened and lost. Literature is an important, if unusual, way to explore these relations. At once centred in imagination and ideas, fiction is also indelibly connected to, as well as influenced by, the geographies in which it is set. As this book argues, the relationship between fiction and location is so important that it is often difficult to know which is imagined and which is real. Exploring the relations between people and place through fiction writing set in Wales, Page and Place garners poetic insight into how places are written into our stories, and how these stories take and make the places around us. The book introduces the notion of 'plot' to describe the complex entanglement between fiction and geography, and to help understand the role that places play in defining human identity.
ENGLISH

Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime Places

156,35€ + 10% CARD

 Literature is a central agent of the maritime cultural imaginary through the negotiation of competing versions of coast and sea. Discussed are historically specific functions of maritime spaces as historicized places, where cultural exchange and 'the technical sublime' are dramatized.
ENGLISH

Perspectives On Mobility

131,18€ + 10% CARD

 Literature as cultural discourse has always courted mobility. From the nomadic wanderings of the heroes of Homer and Virgil through the adventures of the medieval knight-errants to the travellers of modern times, movement and mobility have been constitutive elements of story-telling. Since writers have begun to explore the experiential dimension of movement their texts have embraced the essential changeability and instability of 'mobile worlds'. In this sense literature reflects and processes the transformative force of movement on the perception of the world and is part of the broader cultural discourses of mobility.From the 1936 film Night Mail to the rapid movements of the dime novel detective and the metaphorical coding of automobility in Futurist poetry, the essays in this volume offer new perspectives on the phenomenon of mobility at the intersection between the literary imagination and cultural experience. They explore movement as a decisive force of change in the history of modernity and show how literature in its representation of mobility simultaneously aims both to mirror and to grasp the phenomenon.
ENGLISH

Cormac Mccarthy And The Writing Of American Spaces

by Andrew Keller Estes

131,18€ + 10% CARD

 In Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Andrew Estes examines ideas about the land as they emerge in the later fiction of this important contemporary author. McCarthy's texts are shown to be part of larger narratives about American environments. Against the backdrop of the emerging discipline of environmental criticism, Estes investigates the way space has been constructed in U.S. American writing. Cormac McCarthy is found to be heir to diametrically opposed concepts of space: as something Americans embraced as either overwhelmingly positive and reinvigorating or as rather negative and threatening. McCarthy's texts both replicate this binary thinking about American environments and challenge readers to reconceive traditional ways of seeing space. Breaking new ground as to how literary landscapes and spaces are critically assessed this study seeks to examine the many detailed descriptions of the physical world in McCarthy on their own terms. Adding to so-called 'second wave' environmental criticism, it reaches beyond an earlier, limited understanding of the environment as 'nature' to consider both natural landscapes and built environments. Chapter one discusses the field of environmental criticism in reference to McCarthy while chapter two offers a brief narrative of conceptions of space in the U.S. Chapter three highlights trends in McCarthy criticism. Chapters four through eight provide close readings of McCarthy's later novels, from Blood Meridian to The Road.
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Placing Poetry

182,85€ + 10% CARD

 The essays in this volume present a thorough re-evaluation of the idea of place for the twenty-first century, linking across theoretical interests in space and spatialisation and in motion and mobility. 'Placing' becomes an active process that happens in different parts of the world, and there is work here from the countries of the United Kingdom, from Ireland, the USA, Australia and mainland Europe. Placing also happens in different contexts, in the production of visual images, in translation, in performance and in poetry that is both 'there' and 'here'. The range of poets under consideration matches the breadth of the range of the contributors. International in scope, and drawn from a variety of practices and processes, their combination in a single volume leads to unusual connections and new readings of their work.
ENGLISH

Topodynamics Of Arrival - Essays On Self And Pilgrimage

144,43€ + 10% CARD

 Travelling is the art of motion, motion results in moments of human encountering, and such moments manifest themselves in unsettling linguistic repercussions and crises of meaning. Places of arrival also function as inscriptions of such meaningful repercussions, inscriptions of the past crossing the present, of the other crossing the self. The contributions in this book explore places, rituals, texts and scriptures as religious or secular inscriptions - "topographies" - of such "arrivals."Each arrival happens, and its very place manifests itself only as a momentous component of the process itself. Arrival is an event of conclusion as well as of urgency for subsequent explorations of new meanings to be read from the topography of the place, mirroring thus a signifying dynamic for the metamorphosis of the traveller's self: "topodynamic" of arrival. In this vein this book investigates for the first time the dynamic of cultural formations of space, an aspect of spatiality which since the "spatial turn" in cultural discourse has mostly been neglected.
ENGLISH

Land & Identity - Theory, Memory, And Practice

174,90€ + 10% CARD

 This collection of essays aims to investigate the complex issues surrounding contemporary cultural discourses on land and identity - their production, construction, and reconstruction across a range of different texts and materials. The chapters offer disciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches opening up discussion and new routes for research in a number of interrelated areas such as Countryside vs. City, Diaspora, Landscapes of Memory and Trauma, Migrational Spaces, and Ecology. They represent a number of innovative contemporary responses to how concepts of land intersect and dialogue with notions of identity across and between regions, nations, races, and cultures. Through employing interdisciplinary methods and theories drawn from diverse sources, such as cultural studies, spatial theory, philosophy and literary theory, the chapters chart varied and complex themes of identity formation in relation to spatiality.
ENGLISH

Poetics And Politics Of The Desert - Landscape And The Construction Of America

by Catrin Gersdorf

189,48€ + 10% CARD

 This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.
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Cultural Construction Of London'S East End - Urban Iconography, Modernity And The Spatialisation Of Englishness

by Paul Newland

168,28€ + 10% CARD

 Paul Newland's illuminating study explores the ways in which London's East End has been constituted in a wide variety of texts - films, novels, poetry, television shows, newspapers and journals. Newland argues that an idea or image of the East End, which developed during the late nineteenth century, continues to function in the twenty-first century as an imaginative space in which continuing anxieties continue to be worked through concerning material progress and modernity, rationality and irrationality, ethnicity and 'Otherness', class and its related systems of behaviour. The Cultural Construction of London's East End offers detailed examinations of the ways in which the East End has been constructed in a range of texts including BBC Television's EastEnders, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, films such as Piccadilly, Sparrows Can't Sing, The Long Good Friday, From Hell, The Elephant Man, and Spider, and in the work of Iain Sinclair.
ENGLISH

Inside Out - Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public And Private Space

192,13€ + 10% CARD

 The incursions of women into areas from which they had been traditionally excluded, together with the literary representations of their attempts to negotiate, subvert and appropriate these forbidden spaces, is the underlying theme that unites this collection of essays. Here scholars from Australia, Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Switzerland and the United States reconsider the well-entrenched assumptions associated with the public/private distinction, working with the notions of public and private spheres while testing their currency and exploring their blurred edges. The essays cover and uncover a rich variety of spaces, from the slums and court-rooms of London to the American wilderness, from the Victorian drawing-room and sick-room to out of the ordinary places like Turkish baths and the trenches of the First World War. Where previous studies have tended to focus on a single aspect of women's engagement with space, this edited book reveals a plethora of subtle and tenacious strategies found in a variety of discourses that include fiction, poetry, diaries, letters, essays and journalism. Inside Out goes beyond the early work on artistic explorations of gendered space to explore the breadth of the field and its theoretical implications.
ENGLISH

Spaces Of Belonging - Home, Culture And Identity In 20th-Century French Autobiography

by Elizabeth H. Jones

165,63€ + 10% CARD

 Questions of space, place and identity have become increasingly prominent throughout the arts and humanities in recent times. This study begins by investigating the reasons for this growth in interest and analyses the underlying assumptions on which interdisciplinary discussions about space are often based. After tracing back the history of contact between Geography and Literary Studies from both disciplinary perspectives, it goes on to discuss recent academic work in the field and seeks to forge a new conceptual framework through which contemporary discussions of space and literature can operate. The book then moves on to a thorough application of the interdisciplinary model that it has established. Having argued that the experience of contemporary space has rendered questions of home and belonging particularly pressing, it undertakes detailed analysis of how these phenomena are articulated in a selection of recent French life writing texts. The close, text-led readings reveal that whilst not often highlighted for their relevance to the analysis of space, these works do in fact narrate the impact of some of the most significant cultural experiences of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust and the AIDS crisis, upon geo-cultural senses of identity. Home is shown to be a deeply problematic, yet strongly desired, element of the contemporary world.The book concludes by addressing the underlying thesis that contemporary life writing might provide just the 'postmodern maps' that could help not only literary scholars, but also geographers, better understand the world today. Key names and concepts: Serge Doubrovsky - Herve Guibert - Fredric Jameson - Philippe Lejeune - Regine Robin; Autofiction - Cultural Geography - Interdisciplinarity - Place and Identity - Postmodernism - Space - Postmodern Space - Literary Studies - Twentieth-Century Life Writing.
ENGLISH

Thinking Northern - Textures Of Identity In The North Of England

234,53€ + 10% CARD

 Offers approaches to the processes of identity formation in the diverse fields of cultural, economic and social activity in Britain.
ENGLISH

Landscape And Englishness

197,43€ + 10% CARD

 In the papers collected in this, the first volume of the Spatial Practices series, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies or dwells in. Broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity, its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality, and the new cultural geography, the papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the Home Counties in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett, as the land to die for in war propaganda, and as nostalgia for a unified, organic English culture in Lawrence, Morton and Priestley's travel writing, but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England; English moorland; the sacred geographies of monuments in Hardy and others; the traditional seaside deconstructed in Martin Parr's photography, and the sea as English Victorian imperial territory and its symbolic breezes in Froude's travel writing. The English landscape is also a paradigm for the description of other places in D. H. Lawrence's travel writing or for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie's writing India, a displacement of other landscapes. This collection of papers examines the assumption that constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness.
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No Maps For These Territories - Cities, Spaces, And Archaeologies Of The Future In William Gibson

by Karin Hoepker

137,80€ + 10% CARD

 No Maps for These Territories offers an archaeology of seemingly tried and trusted concepts: cartography, architecture, urban space. While rethinking Michel Foucault's theories, Karin Hoepker reconstructs the cartographic dispositives of spatial order. The futuristic fictional cityscapes of science fiction writer William Gibson are the touchstone for this epistemological analysis and typology of spatial formations. In seven probing chapters that focus on architectural blueprints, forms of inhabitation, Wunderkammern, and economic formations of retail, consumption, and entertainment such as shopping malls, amusement parks, and gambling meccas, Hoepker investigates a set of exemplary phenomena crucial to the fields of architecture, geography, philosophy, cartography, history of science, literary studies, and the arts. No Maps for These Territories thus offers close readings of fictional, philosophical, and theoretical texts, and examines instructive examples of the workings of spatial production. In a form of contrastive writing, the monograph sheds critical light on theoretical and fictional texts equally.
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Reflective Landscapes Of The Anglophone Countries

170,93€ + 10% CARD

 Too many landscapes have been reduced to silent commodities by being put into golden frames on top of our fireplaces. Too many landscapes have been reified by being considered as objects holding forth referents to an omnipotent looker-on, with his/her language ever ready to seize and transcribe. The articles gathered here, prolonging an international conference held at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie (France), 14-16 June 2007, set the landscapes loose again by engaging with their essentially relational quality.What makes this volume particularly stimulating and critically innovative is this initial acknowledgement of a landscape's reflectiveness - that is the fact that it contains unthought thought, and thus presents itself to us both passively and actively. This straightaway appraisal of the lines of flight in the seemingly static, tranquil images facing us, has opened the way to deeply critical readings bent on questioning old tracks, testing new itineraries, denying the closure of the subject. At the same time, and by way of consequence, it leads us to encounter the force in landscape. A force like an energy, an impetus, which makes it possible - if not advisable! - to still compose, read and enjoy landscapes in the XXIst century.
ENGLISH

Process - Landscape And Text

189,48€ + 10% CARD

 While the relationship between place and creative effort has been the focus of pronounced new interest in various disciplines, the contours and co-ordinates of the process by which one informs the other, by which landscape shapes text and vice versa, have yet to be delineated in any systematic fashion. This volume sheds light on that process, investigating the ways in which it is both reciprocal and interstitial: how does text shape our perception of landscape as much as it is shaped by it, and how do we account for the points at which text and landscape intersect? The first part of the volume introduces us to the question of process in landscape and literary studies; the second part examines the moments within the process by which landscape and text come to bear upon each other; and the final part deals with the relationship between the material experience of landscape and the formal characteristics of a given text, using this to reflect back on the processes of landscape perception and creativity. This volume spans the disciplines of geography, literary studies, and the visual arts. It also brings together scholarly and creative perspectives, interspersing academic commentary with poetic-photographic essays.
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Roads Of Her Own - Gendered Space And Mobility In American Women'S Road Narratives, 1970-2000

by Alexandra Ganser

178,88€ + 10% CARD

 Reading Jack Kerouac's classic On the Road through Virginia Woolf's canonical A Room of One's Own, the author of this book examines a genre in North American literature which, despite its popularity, has received little attention in literary and cultural criticism: women's road narratives. The study shows how women's literature has inscribed itself into the American discourse of the Whitmanesque "open road", or, more generally, the "freedom of the road". Women writers have participated in this powerful American myth, yet at the same time also have rejected that myth as fundamentally based on gendered and racial/ethnic hierarchies and power structures, and modified it in the process of writing back to it. The book analyzes stories about female runaways, outlaws, questers, adventurers, kidnappees, biker chicks, travelling saleswomen, and picaras and makes theoretical observations on the debates regarding discourses of spatiality and mobility-debates which have defined the so-called spatial turn in the humanities. The analytical concept of transdifference is introduced to theorize the dissonant plurality of social and cultural affiliations as well as the narrative tensions produced by such pluralities in order to better understand the textual worlds of women's multiple belongings as they are present in these writings. Roads of Her Own is thus not only situated in the broader context of a constructivist cultural studies, but also, by discussing narrative mobility under the sign of gender, combines insights from social theory and philosophy, feminist cultural geography, and literary studies. Key names and concepts: Doreen Massey - Rosi Braidotti - Literary Studies - Spatial Turn - Gendered Space and Mobility - Nomadism - Road writing - Transdifference - American Culture - Popular Culture - Women's Literature after the Second Wave - Quest - Picara.
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Space In Theory - Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze

by Russell West-Pavlov

144,43€ + 10% CARD

 Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze seeks to give a detailed but succinct overview of the role of spatial reflection in three of the most influential French critical thinkers of recent decades. It proposes a step-by-step analysis of the changing place of space in their theories, focussing on the common problematic all three critics address, but highlighting the significant differences between them. It aims to rectify an unaccountable absence of detailed analysis to the significance of space in their work up until now.Space in Theory argues that Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze address the question: How are meaning and knowledge produced in contemporary society? What makes it possible to speak and think in ways we take for granted? The answer which all three thinkers provide is: space. This space takes various forms: psychic, subjective space in Kristeva, power-knowledge-space in Foucault, and the spaces of life as multiple flows of becoming in Deleuze. This book alternates between analyses of these thinkers' theoretical texts, and brief digressions into literary texts by Barrico, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Bodrozic or Bonnefoy, via Borges, Forster, Gide, Gilbert, Glissant, Hall, to Kafka, Ondaatje, Perec, Proust, Sartre, Warner and Woolf. These detours through literature aim to render more concrete and accessible the highly complex conceptulization of contemporary spatial theory.This volume is aimed at students, postgraduates and researchers interested in the areas of French poststructuralist theory, spatial reflection, or more generally contemporary cultural theory and cultural studies
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Futurescapes - Space In Utopian And Science Fiction Discourses

192,13€ + 10% CARD

 This book testifies to the growing interest in the many spaces of utopia. It intends to 'map out' on utopian and science-fiction discourses some of the new and revisionist models of spatial analysis applied in Literary and Cultural Studies in recent years. The aim of the volume is to side-step the established generic binary of utopia and dystopia or science fiction and thus to open the analysis of utopian literature to new lines of inquiry. The essays collected here propose to think of utopias not so much as fictional texts about future change and transformation but as vital elements in a cultural process through which social, spatial and subjective identities are formed. Utopias can thus be read as textual systems implying a distinct spatial and temporal dimension; as 'spatial practices' that tend to naturalize a cultural and social construction - that of the 'good life', the radically improved welfare state, the Christian paradise, the counter-society, etc. - and make that representation operational by interpellating their readers in some determinate relation to their givenness as sites of political and individual improvement. This volume is of interest for all scholars and students of literature who wish to explore the ways in which utopias of the past and recent present have circulated as media of cultural exchange and homogenization, as sites of cultural and linguistic appropriation and as foci for the spatial formation of national and regional identities in the English-speaking world.
ENGLISH

Cultural Construction Of Hidden Spaces - Essays On Pockets, Pouches And Secret Drawers

~~215,98€~~ 194,38€ 10% OFF

 This essay collection focuses on enclosure, deception and secrecy in three spatial areas - the body, clothing and furniture. It contributes to the study of private life and explores the micro-history of hidden spaces. The contents of pockets may prove a surer index to their owner's real thoughts than anything they say; a piece of furniture with ingenious mechanisms created to conceal secrets may also reveal someone's attempts to break in and thus give away as much as it holds. Though the book's focus is on particular material or imagined objects, taken as a whole it exemplifies a range of interdisciplinary encounters between history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, archival studies, museology and curating, and women's studies.
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Literary Invention And The Cartographic Imagination - Early Modern To Late Modern

192,13€ + 10% CARD

 Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern is a wide-ranging, inter- and transdisciplinary approach grounded in the twin rigors of theory and history, which, through close readings of authors from Edmund Spenser to Olga Tokarczuk, and through considered discussions of the ideologies of walking and mapping, in performance art and cultural representation, assesses and analyses the significance of maps to literary texts, and which examines the ways in which the literary maps imaginary and real worlds. Together, the essays demonstrate convincingly the close relationship between text, map and culture.
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Pictorial Photography And The American West, 1900-1950 - The Broad Movement

by Rachel Sailor

182,85€ + 10% CARD

 This book is an investigation of the widely overlooked photographic style of pictorialism in the American West between 1900 and 1950 and argues that western pictorialist photographers were regionalists that had their roots in the formidable photographic heritage of the nineteenth-century West. Driven by a wealth of textual and visual primary sources, the book addresses the West's relationship with the eastern centers of art in the early century, the diversity of practitioners such as women, Japanese Americans, Indigenous Americans, western rural workers, etc., and the style's final demise as it related to the modernism of Group F.64. Couched in the rhetoric of regionalism; it is a refreshing and innovative approach to an overlooked wealth of American cultural production.
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