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2020

Books

William Blake: Modernity and Disaster
Edited by Professors Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak | 2020
University of Toronto Press

William Blake: Modernity and Disaster explores the work of the Romantic writer, artist, and visionary William Blake as a profoundly creative response to cultural, scientific, and political revolution. In the wake of such anxieties of discovery, including the revolution in the life sciences, Blake’s imagination – often prophetic, apocalyptic, and deconstructive – offers an inside view of such tumultuous and catastrophic change.

Following the Formula in Beowulf, Örvar-Odds saga, and Tolkien
Professor Michael Fox | 2020
Palgrave Macmillan

Fox's book proposes that Beowulf was composed according to a formula. Michael Fox imagines the process that generated the poem and provides a model for reading it, extending this model to investigate formula in a half-line, a fitt, a digression, and a story-pattern or folktale, including the Old-Norse Icelandic Örvar-Odds saga. Fox also explores how J. R. R. Tolkien used the same formula to write Sellic Spell and The Hobbit. This investigation uncovers relationships between oral and literate composition, between mechanistic composition and author, and between listening and reading audiences, arguing for a contemporary relevance for Beowulf in thinking about the creative process.

Chapter: "The Indian Wife Abroad: Narrating Nation and Tradition in Popular Hindi Films" in Post-Colonial Praxis: Ramifications and Intricacies
Chapter by Anmol Dutta, PhD Student | 2020
Notion Press Publishing

This book offers a perspective of the future by looking through the scope of the past, meeting in a focal point of the present. The paradox echoed models concerns that are relevant to the current climate of the Global Economy: “Where are we now?” “How do we move forward?” The subthemes explored dissect the influence of Postcolonialism across a diverse spectrum and its relation to socio-economic application. Authors take a dive into the minds of a selected few of the foremost authorities on these disciplines, proposing their synopsis in a critical exploratory manner. Through these papers, the provocation that brings along revelation, enlightenment, introspection, refreshed perspective, context, self-realization and inevitably change, marks the genesis of a new frontier in chartering the way forward.

Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University
Professor Kim Solga | 2020
Routledge

Exploring how educators and institutions might embrace the STEAM turn to ensure that theatre and performance can be instrumentalto the neoliberal university, without being instrumentalizedby it, this volume showcases alternative models for teaching and learning in theatre and performance in a neoliberal age.

Originally a special issue of Research in Drama Education, this volume foregrounds the above ideas in six principal articles, and provides a range of potential models for change in twelve case study discussions. Detailing a variety of ‘best practices’ in theatre and performance education, contributors demonstrate how postsecondary educators around the world have recentred drama and performance by collaborating with STEM-side faculty, using theatre principles to frame and support interdisciplinary learning, and working toward important applications beyond the classroom. Arguing that the neoliberal university needs theatre and performance more than ever, this valuable collection emphasizes the critical contribution which these subjects continue to make to the development of students, staff, and institutions.

This book will be of particular interest to students, researchers, and librarians in the fields of Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Applied Theatre, Drama in Education, and Holistic Education.

Conference Presentations

Dutta, Anmol. "Coro(Na)tionalist Solidarity Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic in India." Re:Locations 2020 Symposium: Resilience and Disaster: The Global South During COVID-19, University of Toronto.

2019

Books

Asemic The Art of Writing
Professor Peter Schwenger | 2019
University of Minnesota Press

In recent years, asemic writing—writing without language—has exploded in popularity, with anthologies, a large-scale art exhibition, and flourishing interest on sites like tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. Asemic is the first critical study of this fascinating field, proposing new ways of rethinking the nature of writing and exploring how asemic writing has evolved and gained importance today.

Citrus and Shadow
Jeffrey Reid Pettis, MA Student | 2019
Vocamus Press

Citrus and Shadow is a chapbook of lyric poetry, thoughtful and measured, deft and curious. It is a poetry that explores the world, not by dissecting it or pulling it to pieces, but by holding it closely and paying it full attention. Its challenge to the reader is that we also come to hold the world more closely, that we also pay it our full attention, so that we also can come to know it better.

Writing the Self in Illness
Amala Poli, PhD Student | 2019
Manipal Universal Press

Writing the Self in Illness: Reading the Experiential Through the Medical Memoir attempts to understand the contemporary turn to health narratives through closely reading medical memoirs. The author uses the term medical memoir for a narrative of illness that seeks to question, resist, and engage in a dialogue with prominent medical discourses and cultural perceptions. The book attempts to understand how individuals have reflected on their experiences of illness, redefined health for themselves, and responded to systemic and social depersonalization through the writing of memoirs. It encompasses select literary memoirs from the 1980s to 2017 that seek to explore perceptions of health and illness through various assimilations and rejections. In doing so, it also delves into the social and individual contexts of these memoirs to explore the embedded meanings and questions raised about love, hope, and recovery in the wake of illness. Writing the Self in Illness invites readers to a deeper exploration of the spectrum of health and its meanings for each of us.

A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age
Professor Kim Solga | 2019
Bloomsbury

To call something modern is to assert something fundamental about the social, cultural, economic and technical sophistication of that thing, over and against what has come before. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age provides an interdisciplinary overview of theatre and performance in their social and material contexts from the late 19th century through the early 2000s, emphasizing key developments and trends that both exemplify and trouble the various meanings of the term 'modern', and the identity of modernist theatre and performance.

Theatre and Performance vs the ‘Crisis in the Humanities’
Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance
Professor Kim Solga | 2019
Routledge | Taylor & Francis Online

In this introduction here, guest editor Kim Solga reflects on the origins of the issue, details its scope, offers grounding definitions of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘the neoliberal university’, and charts one possible way forward, in hope.

Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose
Professor Jonathan Boulter | 2019
Edinburgh University Press

Jonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett’s presentation of the human, more precisely, posthuman, subject in his short prose. These texts are notoriously difficult yet utterly compelling. This compelling difficulty arises from Beckett’s radical dismantling of the idea of the human. His short texts offer instead an image of a being who may be posthumous, or ultimately beyond categories of life and death. And yet, despite this dismantling, the narrators of these texts still find themselves placed within material, recognisable, spaces. This book explores what the idea of ‘world’ can mean to a subject who appears to have moved into a material, even ecological, space that is beyond categories of life and death, being and world.

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House and Beyond
Professor Miranda Green-Barteet | 2019
University Press of Mississippi

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond offers a sustained, critical examination of Wilder's writings, including her Little House series, her posthumously published and unrevised The First Four Years, her letters, her journalism, and her autobiography, Pioneer Girl. The collection also draws on biographies of Wilder, letters to and from Wilder and her daughter, collaborator and editor Rose Wilder Lane, and other biographical materials. Contributors analyze the current state of Wilder studies, delineating Wilder's place in a canon of increasingly diverse US women writers, and attending in particular to issues of gender, femininity, space and place, truth, and collaboration, among other issues.

Under the Gamma Camera
Professor Madeline Bassnett | 2019
Gaspereau Press

Under the Gamma Camera is a frank portrait of our relationship with disease, exploring the contrary state of being that is illness. Rooted in her own experience of diagnosis, treatment and remission, Madeline Bassnett’s poems bristle with authenticity, with tactile and emotional detail available only to one who has lived it. A major preoccupation in these poems is reconciling the contradictory ways in which we experience illness and treatment—an experience at once deeply personal and human and also strangely impersonal and clinical. On one side is a catalogue of emotional responses, from denial, resistance and a sense of betrayal, to gratitude and relief; on the other, the strange detachment from our own body, the indifference of our corrupt cells to our fate, and the often alienating medical complex and the technology mobilized in our aid. Bassnett pays particular attention to the way the body is the medium through which all these things are experienced.

THE SUPERMARKET OF THE VISIBLE - Toward a General Economy of Images
Professor Jan Plug | 2019
Fordham University Press

Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described “a one hundred per cent image-space.” Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the image and economics.

Theory for Theatre Studies: Space
Professor Kim Solga | 2019
Bloomsbury Press

Her latest book provides a comprehensive introduction to the “spatial turn” in modern theatre and performance theory, exploring topics as diverse as embodied space, environmental performance politics, and urban performance studies. The book is written in accessible prose and features in-depth case studies of a range of performance works.

Bear No Malice
Professor Clarissa (Harwood) Suranyi | 2019
Pegasus Books

Pitched as Grantchester meets Great Expectations, Bear No Malice is the story of Tom, an Anglican priest and social reformer who has been covering up his mistakes and lying about his traumatic past for so many years that he no longer knows who he is. It’s also the story of Miranda, an artist and Lady of Shalott figure who is haunted by her own painful past. When Tom’s secrets catch up with him and his reputation is destroyed, he realizes that Miranda is the only person he trusts with the truth. What he doesn’t realize is that even if she believes him and returns his feelings, he can’t free her from the shackles of her past.

2018

Books

Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson
Professor Kate Stanley | 2018
Cambridge University Press

Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson locates a paradoxical question - how does one prepare to be surprised? - at the heart of several major modernist texts. Arguing that this paradox of perception gives rise to an American literary methodology, this book dramatically reframes how practices of reading and writing evolved among modernist authors after Emerson. Whereas Walter Benjamin defines modernity as a 'series of shocks' inflicted from without, Emerson offers a countervailing optic that regards life as a 'series of surprises' unfolding from within. While Benjaminian shock elicits intimidation and defensiveness, Emersonian surprise fosters states of responsiveness and spontaneity whereby unexpected encounters become generative rather than enervating. As a study of how such states of responsiveness were cultivated by a post-Emerson tradition of writers and thinkers, this project displaces longstanding models of modernist perception defined by shock's passive duress, and proposes alternate models of reception that proceed from the active practice of surprise.

A Heraldic Miscellany
Professor Richard Moll | 2018
Liverpool University Press

It is difficult to envision the Middle Ages without heraldry; knights and ladies are routinely depicted with elaborate arms gracing their shields and clothing. The herald himself is also pervasive in the popular imagination, as he announces the arrival of some grandee. Edited here for the first time are some of the texts which detail the relationship between heraldic design and working heralds. That relationship changed dramatically over the fifteenth century as heralds claimed the right to design, interpret and grant arms according to an elaborate interpretive system. These texts, the work of clerics, heralds and even a future pope, describe the rules of heraldic design and the meaning of colours and charges. They also focus on the role of the herald himself, whether he is serving as a political or personal confidant, or organizing a trial by combat. Finally, they outline an imagined history of the office of arms, claiming that the herald’s authority could be traced to Julius Caesar, the Trojan hero Hector, or even the god Dionysus. These texts, little known in contemporary scholarship, provide valuable insight into the intellectual and visual culture of fifteenth-century chivalric society.

Queerness in Play
Meghan Blythe Adams | 2018
Palgrave Macmillan

Queerness in Play examines the many ways queerness of all kinds—from queer as ‘LGBT’ to other, less well-covered aspects of the queer spectrum—intersects with games and the social contexts of play. The current unprecedented visibility of queer creators and content comes at a high tide of resistance to the inclusion of those outside a long-imagined cisgender, heterosexual, white male norm. By critically engaging the ways games—as a culture, an industry, and a medium—help reproduce limiting binary formations of gender and sexuality, Queerness in Play contributes to the growing body of scholarship promoting more inclusive understandings of identity, sexuality, and games.

The Patriot Poets - American Odes, Progress Poems, and the State of the Union
Stephen Adams, Professor Emeritus | 2018
McGill-Queen's University Press

Since before the Declaration of Independence, poets have shaped a collective imagination of nationhood at critical points in American history. In The Patriot Poets Stephen Adams considers major odes and "progress poems" that address America's destiny in the face of slavery, the Civil War, imperialist expansion, immigration, repeated financial boom and bust, gross social inequality, racial and gendered oppression, and the rise of the present-day corporate oligarchy.

Book Chapters & Articles

Adams, M., Rambukanna, N., “Why do I have to make a choice? Maybe the three of us could, uh…”: Non-monogamy in Video Game Narratives”, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 18.2 (September 2018).

MacLean, A., “Writing Back To Massa: The Black Open Letter in Transnational Abolitionist Literature.” Reading Between the Borderlines: Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49th Parallel, Ed. Gillian Roberts, McGill-Queen’s University Press (2018): 41-66.

Pennee, D., “Transatlantic Figures in The Imperialist: Public Sentiment, Private Appetite”, Canadian Literature 234 (Autumn 2017): 33-50 (published August 2018).

Shrivastava, N., "The Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Priya’s Shakti (2012)", South Asian Review (October 2018): pp. 1-15.

Sunder, J., “Religious Beef: Dalit Literature, Bare Life, and Cow Protection in India”, Interventions – International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (December 2018).

2017

Books

The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell
Professor Allan Pero | 2017
University Press of Florida

The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell argues that Sitwell was crucial to the development of a British avant-garde that operated alongside the conventionally accepted transatlantic modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. With Sitwell as an influential literary player and social architect, the British interwar arts scene was not an ascetic escape from personality—as the modernism of Pound and Eliot has often been characterized—but an alternative space of flamboyant, extravagant, and ornate performance.

A Woman Killed with Kindness
Professor Margaret Jane Kidnie | 2017
Bloomsbury

The most studied of Thomas Heywood's plays, A Woman Killed With Kindness explores the boundaries of marital punishment and the moral weight of mercy. This major new edition of this startling domestic tragedy offers the standard, depth and range associated with all Arden editions. The on-page commentary notes explain the language, references and staging issues posed by the text while the lengthy, illustrated introduction offers a lively overview of the play's historical, performance and critical contexts. This is the ideal edition for study and performance.

Today's Medieval University
Professor Jane Toswell | 2017
Arc Humanities Press

Just how medieval is the modern university? Rarely do even scholars of medievalism employ its methods and approaches to thinking about institutions. Universities arose out of concerns of the church and the state in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Western Europe. From the beginning, they were fixtures, and from the beginning, they needed extensive renovation. And yet, universities have remained monolithic and static entities, renovating themselves just enough – but never more than enough – to avoid massive interventions by the state or the church or other elements in the system. Like parliamentary democracies, they function just well enough that while feelings of despair are frequent, and anticipation of imminent collapse constant, they continue. In the modern era, as universities face a new set of challenges, this book asks if there is not some value in pondering the medieval university, the origin stories for the modern university, and the continuities that exist as much as do the fractures. Universities offer a fascinating lens on what society considers important. Not only should we consider the role of the university in every society, we should consider how that role has instantiated itself over many generations, and even over nearly one millennium. The extent to which the modern university is medieval offers, the author suggests, both cause for hope and cause for concern.

Performing Self/Performing Gender: Reading the lives of Women Performers in Colonial India
Sheetala Bhat, PhD Student | 2017
Manipal Universal Press

This book explores the shifting identity of the female performer in India, starting from the late 19th century to the early years of independence, through the study of autobiographies and memoirs. It attempts to make visible the actress figure by entering the history of performance, guided by the voice of the female performer. The discussion on performing woman in this book spans across the performing traditions of the tawaif, actresses in public theatre, early Indian film actresses, and actresses in the Indian People’s Theatre and the Prithvi Theatre.

Peninsula Sinking
David Huebert | 2017
Biblioasis

In Peninsula Sinking, David Huebert brings readers an assortment of Maritimers caught between the places they love and the siren call of elsewhere. From submarine officers to prison guards, oil refinery workers to academics, each character in these stories struggles to find some balance of spiritual and emotional grace in the world increasingly on the precipice of ruin. Peninsula Sinking offers up eight urgent and electric meditations on the mysteries of death and life, of grief and love, and never shies away from the joy and horror of our submerging world.

2016

Books

Mandeville
Professor Tilottama Rajan | 2016
Broadview Press

William Godwin’s Mandeville was described as his best novel by Percy Shelley, who sent a copy to Lord Byron, and it was immediately recognized by its other admirers as a work of unique power. Written one year after the battle of Waterloo and set in an earlier revolutionary period between the execution of Charles I and the Restoration, Mandeville is a novel of psychological warfare. The narrative begins with Mandeville’s rescue from the traumatic aftermath of the Ulster Rebellion of 1641 and proceeds through his early education by a fanatical Presbyterian minister to his persecution at Winchester school, his constant (and not unjustified) paranoia, and his confinement in an asylum. Mandeville’s final, desperate attempt to prevent his sister’s marriage to his enemy ends with his disfiguration, which also defaces endings based on settlement or reconciliation. The novel’s events have many resonances with Godwin’s own period.

The historical appendices offer contemporary reviews, including Shelley’s letter to Godwin praising Mandeville, material explaining the novel’s complex historical background, and contemporary writings on war, madness, and trauma.

Pilgrimage
Professor Madeline Bassnett | 2016
Baseline Press

Madeline Bassnett teaches English and Creative Writing at Western University. She is the author of a previous chapbook, Elegies (Frog Hollow Press), and her poems have appeared in journals such as Prairie Fire, Grain, Riddle Fence, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and The Malahat Review. Her first full-length collection is upcoming with Gaspereau Press.

Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England
Professor Madeline Bassnett | 2016
Palgrave Macmillan

This book is about the relationship of food and food practices to discourses and depictions of domestic and political governance in early modern women’s writing. It examines the texts of four elite women spanning approximately forty years: the Psalmes of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; the maternal nursing pamphlet of Elizabeth Clinton, Dowager Countess of Lincoln; the diary of Margaret, Lady Hoby; and Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth’s prose romance, Urania. It argues that we cannot gain a full picture of what food meant to the early modern English without looking at the works of women, who were the primary managers of household foodways. In examining food practices such as hospitality, gift exchange, and charity, this monograph demonstrates that women, no less than men, engaged with vital social, cultural and political processes.

The Value of Milton
Professor John Leonard | 2016
Cambridge University Press

In The Value of Milton, leading critic John Leonard explores the writings of John Milton from his early poetry to his major prose. Milton's work includes one of the most difficult and challenging texts in the English literary canon, yet he remains impressively popular with general readers. Leonard demonstrates why Milton has enduring value for our own time, both as a defender of political liberty and as a poet of sublimity and terror who also exhibits moments of genuine humanity and compassion. A poet divided against himself, Milton offers different rewards to different readers. The Value of Milton examines not only the significance of his most celebrated verse but also the function of biblical allegory, classical culture, and the moods, voice and language that give Milton's writings their perennial appeal.

They Have All Been Healed - Reading Robert Walser
Professor Jan Plug | 2016
Northwestern University Press

In perhaps the most provocative reading to date of the Swiss German modernist Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin asserted that Walser's figures "have all been healed." They Have All Been Healed takes up and extends Benjamin's assessment by following the figure of healing throughout major works by Walser, from his minidrama Snow White and his acknowledged masterpieces The Walk and Jakob von Gunten to his enigmatic last novel, The Robber. At the same time, Jan Plug reads Walser alongside his most compelling readers, tracing how not only Benjamin but also Giorgio Agamben, W. G. Sebald, and the Brothers Quay complicate, clarify, and enact that same process of healing in their own work. Working out the theological implications of Walser's work and of the tradition to which he gives rise, Plug at once recasts one of the major authors of the twentieth century and articulates a new conception of healing and salvation.

Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama - Canon, Collaboration and Text
Professor James Purkis | 2016
Cambridge University Press

How did Shakespeare write his plays and how were they revised during their passage to the stage? James Purkis answers these questions through a fresh examination of often overlooked evidence provided by manuscripts used in early modern playhouses. Considering collaboration and theatre practice, this book explores manuscript plays by Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Heywood to establish new accounts of theatrical revision that challenge formerly dominant ideas in Shakespearean textual studies. The volume also reappraises Shakespeare's supposed part in the Sir Thomas More manuscript by analysing the palaeographic, orthographic, and stylistic arguments for Shakespeare's authorship of three of the document's pages. Offering a new account of manuscript writing that avoids conventional narrative forms, Purkis argues for a Shakespeare fully participant in a manuscript's collaborative process, demanding a reconsideration of his dramatic canon. The book will greatly interest researchers and advanced students of Shakespeare studies, textual history, authorship studies and theatre historians.

Early English Poetic Culture and Meter: The Influence of G. R. Russom
Professor Jane Toswell | 2016
Medieval Institute Publications

This volume develops G. R. Russom’s contributions to early English metre and style, including his fundamental reworkings and rethinkings of accepted and oft-repeated mantras, including his word-foot theory, concern for the late medieval context for alliterative metre, and the linguistics of punctuation and translation as applied to Old English texts.

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives
Professor Mary Helen McMurran | 2016
University of Toronto Press

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century’s two predominant approaches to the natural world – mechanistic materialism and vitalism – in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.

The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The Education and Careers of Six Professionals
Professor Jo Devereux | 2016
McFarland Publishing

When women were admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1860, female art students gained a foothold in the most conservative art institution in England. The Royal Female College of Art, the South Kensington Schools and the Slade School of Fine Art also produced increasing numbers of women artists. Their entry into a male-dominated art world altered the perspective of other artists and the public. They came from disparate levels of society - Princess Louise, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, studied sculpture at the National Art Training School - yet they all shared ambition, talent and courage. Analyzing their education and careers, this book argues that the women who attended the art schools during the 1860s and 1870s - including Kate Greenaway, Elizabeth Butler, Helen Allingham, Evelyn De Morgan and Henrietta Rae - produced work that would accommodate yet subtly challenge the orthodoxies of the fine art establishment. Without their contributions, Victorian art would be not simply the poorer but hardly recognizable to us today.

2015

Books

Parables of the Posthuman - Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience
Professor Jonathan Boulter | 2015
Wayne State University Press

In its intimate joining of self and machine, video gaming works to extend the body into a fluid, dynamic, unstable, and discontinuous entity. While digital gaming and culture has become a popular field of academic study, there has been a lack of sustained philosophical analysis of this direct gaming experience. Author, Jonathan Boulter addresses this gap by analyzing video games and the player experience philosophically. Finding points of departure in phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Boulter argues that we need to think seriously about what it means to enter into a relationship with the game machine and to assume (or to have conferred upon you) a machinic, posthuman identity.

Parables of the Posthuman approaches the experience of gaming by asking: What does it mean for the player to enter the machinic "world" of the game? What forms of subjectivity does the game offer to the player? What happens to consciousness itself when one plays? To this end, Boulter analyzes the experience of particular role-playing video games, including Fallout 3, Half-Life 2, BioShock, Crysis 2, and Metal Gear Solid 4. These games both thematize the idea of the posthuman—the games are "about" subjects whose physical and intellectual capacities are extended through machine or other prosthetic means—and also enact an experience of the posthuman for the player, who becomes more than what he was as he plays the game. Boulter concludes by exploring how the game acts as a parable of what the human, or posthuman, may look like in times to come.

Academics with an interest in the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and popular culture forms and video gamers with an interest in thinking about the implications of gaming will enjoy this volume.

Shakespeare and Textual Studies
Professor Margaret Jane Kidnie | 2015
Cambridge University Press

Shakespeare and Textual Studies gathers contributions from the leading specialists in the fields of manuscript and textual studies, book history, editing, and digital humanities to provide a comprehensive reassessment of how manuscript, print and digital practices have shaped the body of works that we now call 'Shakespeare'. This cutting-edge collection identifies the legacies of previous theories and places special emphasis on the most recent developments in the editing of Shakespeare since the 'turn to materialism' in the late twentieth century. Providing a wide-ranging overview of current approaches and debates, the book explores Shakespeare's poems and plays in light of new evidence, engaging scholars, editors, and book historians in conversations about the recovery of early composition and publication, and the ongoing appropriation and transmission of Shakespeare's works through new technologies.

The Ecology of Modernism - American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics
Professor Joshua Schuster | 2015
The University of Alabama Press

In The Ecology of Modernism, Joshua Schuster examines the relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution. He posits that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission.

Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare
Professor Paul Werstine | 2015
Cambridge University Press

Drawing on the work of the influential scholars A.W. Pollard and W.W. Greg, Werstine tackles the difficult issues surrounding 'foul papers' and 'promptbooks' to redefine these fundamental categories of current Shakespeare editing. In an extensive and detailed analysis, this book offers insight into the methods of theatrical personnel and a reconstruction of backstage practices in playhouses of Shakespeare's time. The book also includes a detailed analysis of nineteen manuscripts and three quartos marked up for performance – documents that together provide precious insight into how plays were put into production. Using these surviving manuscripts as a framework, Werstine goes on to explore editorial choices about what to give today's readers as 'Shakespeare'.

Introduction: Schelling After Theory
Professor Tilottama Rajan | 2015
Journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy

After years of neglect by English-speaking historians of philosophy, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) is finally being recognized as one of the most important of the German idealists. Schelling's long career began with the torrent of works he authored in Naturphilosophie (treaties that inspired, among many others, the young Hegel) and finished with the monumental lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation. These last lectures are still largely untranslated but are widely recognized as sounding the death-knell of German idealism and the beginning of existentialism. The experimental works of Schelling's middle period (1809-1815) have received considerable attention as precursors of Heidegger and Lacan. With the founding of the North American Schelling Society in 2011, we can safely say the tide has turned.

Balþos Gadedeis Aþalhaidais in Sildaleikalanda
David Carlton | 2015
Evertype

The first Gothic language translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, complete with introduction, commentary, and glossary.

Gothic (Gutiska razda or Gutrazda) was a continental Germanic language spoken by the Visigoths and Ostrogoths in many areas (most notably Spain and Italy) throughout antiquity and the early Middle Ages; while Gothic appears to have become functionally extinct sometime in the eighth century, some form of the language may have continued to be spoken in the Crimea until the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The Gothic Bible, translated from a lost Greek exemplar sometime ca. 360 CE by the Gothic bishop Wulfila, represents the earliest substantive text in any Germanic language. Gothic itself remains the only significant representation of the East Germanic branch of languages, which have since died off completely. Other extant works in Gothic include an exegesis of the Gospel of John known as Skeireins, a partial calendar, and some minor fragments. Unfortunately, all extant texts are incomplete, so it remains unknown to what extent the extant fragments are written in idiomatic Gothic, as well as exactly what dialect of Gothic they might represent.

This translation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” seeks to transport Carroll’s seminal work into the fourth-century Germanic world by Gothicizing both the language and environment of the original text.

We are no longer the smart kids in class
David Huebert | 2015
Guernica Editions

From the drunk tank to the graduate seminar, We are no longer the smart kids in class asks what it means to think and be, play and learn, ride bikes and make love in a world of depleting resources, technological proliferation, and corroding ecosystems. A fantasia of academic disillusionment and deflating youth, this collection contemplates moustaches, mountains, and oceans from Halifax to Victoria, always wondering how poetry matters to the heaving, melting, masturbating world it dramatizes.

2014

Books

By Necessity and Indirection: Essays on Modernism in Canadian Literature
Professor David Bentley | 2014
Tecumseh Press Ltd.

By Necessity and Indirection: Essays on Modernism in Canadian Literature ranges widely over poetry, fiction, and non-fiction from the 1920s to the 1960s. After situating Canadian Modernism in its national and international contexts, Bentley examines works by such major authors as A.M. Klein, A.J.M. Smith, Sinclair Ross, Howard O'Hagan, Northrop Frye, and Al Purdy, exploring not only the individual qualities of each work, but also its relation to the ideas, themes, and techniques characteristic of Modernism. The collection is remarkable both for its broad sweep and for its sharply focused and brightly illuminating readings. 

The Testimonial Uncanny
Professor Julia Emberley | 2014
SUNY Press

Through the study of Indigenous literary and artistic practices from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, Julia V. Emberley examines the ways Indigenous storytelling discloses and repairs the traumatic impact of social violence in settler colonial nations. She focuses on Indigenous storytelling in a range of cultural practices, including novels, plays, performances, media reports, Internet museum exhibits, and graphic novels. In response to historical trauma such as that experienced at Indian residential schools, as well as present-day violence against Indigenous bodies and land, Indigenous storytellers make use of Indigenous spirituality and the sacred to inform an ethics of hospitality. They provide uncanny configurations of political and social kinships between people, between the past and the present, and between the animate and inanimate. This book introduces readers to cultural practices and theoretical texts concerned with bringing Indigenous epistemologies to the discussion of trauma and colonial violence.

Book Chapters & Articles

Adams, S.,“‘Speaking as an American to Americans’: James Russell Lowell’s 'Harvard Commemoration Ode' and the Idea of Nationhood” in Christopher Hebert & Martin Griffin, eds., American Political Fictions.

Ionica, C., “Masochism ± Benefits, or Acker with Lacan.” Literature and Pornography. Spec. issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory.

McDonald, R., "The Frame-Breakers: Thomas Pynchon's Posthuman Luddites." Canadian Review of American Studies.

Simonsen, R., “Dark Avunculate: Shame, Animality, and Queer Development in Wilde’s ‘The Star-Child’.” Children’s Literature.

2013

Books

Real Money and Romanticism
Professor Matthew Rowlinson | 2013
Cambridge University Press

A fresh and radically different contribution to the growing field of inquiry into the 'economics' of literature, Matthew Rowlinson's study of Real Money and Romanticism offers an ingenious and challenging reading of Romantic discourse from the point of view of monetary theory and history. 

The Booke of Ovyde Named Methamorphose
Professor Richard Moll | 2013
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies

William Caxton’s translation of the prose Ovide Moralisé was the first English version of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Caxton's translation can be used as an entry point into the complex textual tradition of Ovidian commentaries. The present edition seeks to renew interest in Caxton’s text and to encourage study of it in its own right. 

The Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970
Professor John Leonard | 2013
Oxford University Press

Faithful Labourers surveys and evaluates existing criticism of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, tracing the major debates as they have unfolded over the past three centuries. Eleven chapters split over two volumes consider the key debates in Milton criticism, including discussion of Milton's style, his use of the epic genre, and his references to Satan, God, innocence, the fall, sex, nakedness, and astronomy. 

Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress
Professor Pauline Wakeham | 2013
University of Toronto Press

As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this multicultural settler state. In this volume, leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences relate contemporary political and social efforts to redress wrongs to the fraught history of government relations with Aboriginal and diasporic populations. The contributors offer ground-breaking perspectives on Canada’s ‘culture of redress,’ broaching questions of law and constitutional change, political coalitions, commemoration, testimony, and literatures of injury and its aftermath. Also assembled together for the first time is a collection of primary documents – including government reports, parliamentary debates, and redress movement statements – prefaced with contextual information. Reconciling Canada provides a vital and immensely relevant illumination of the dynamics of reconciliation, apology, and redress in contemporary Canada.

Book Chapters & Articles

Adams, S., “Philip Freneau's Summa of American Exceptionalism: 'The Rising Glory of America' – Without Brackenridge” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Forthcoming in December 2013. Print.

King, F., “Oscar Wilde’s Salome and the Queer Space of the Book.” Wilde's  Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Annette M. Magid. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013. Print. 

Wenaus,  A., "Twilight of Information Illiteracy: Kenji Siratori's Asemic Cyberpunk." Foundation 113 (2013): 29-48. Print.

2012

Books

Melancholy and the Archive
Professor Jonathan Boulter | 2012
Bloomsbury

Melancholy and the Archive examines how trauma, history and memory are represented in key works of major contemporary writers, and shows how select authors construct crucial relationships between sites of memory—the archive becomes a central trope here—and the self that has been subjected to various traumas, various losses.

Shame and Guilt in Chaucer
Professor Anne Schuurman (McTaggart) | 2012
Palgrave Macmillan

Shame and Guilt in Chaucer explores the representation of emotions as psychological concepts and cultural constructs in Geoffrey Chaucer's narrative poetry. McTaggart argues that Chaucer's main works including The Canterbury Tales are united thematically in their positive view of guilt and in their anxiety about the desire for sacrifice and vengeance that shame can provoke. 

 

Praharfeast: James Joyce in Prague
Michael Groden | 2012
Prague: Litteraria Pragensia

This collection of essays, drawn from the sessions, plenaries, and roundtable discussions of the XXIInd International James Joyce Symposium that took place in June, 2010, in Prague, covers a range of subjects from the Joyce/Kafka intertext and the Prague Linguistic Circle, to recent advances in the genetic criticism of Joyce.

At the Borders of Sleep
Peter Schwenger | 2012
University of Minnesota Press

At the Borders of Sleep is a unique exploration of the connections between literature and the liminal states between waking and sleeping. Ultimately arguing that both the reading and writing of literature are liminal experiences, taking place on the edges of consciousness, Peter Schwenger suggests new ways to think about the nature of literature and consciousness. 

Book Chapters & Articles

Groden, M. and Mahaffey, V., "Silence and Fractals: 'The Sisters'," in Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in  Dialogue, edited by Vicki Mahaffey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012, pp. 23-47. Print.

Groden, M. and Mahaffey, V., "Silence and Fractals: 'The Sisters'," in Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in  Dialogue, edited by Vicki Mahaffey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012, pp. 23-47. Print.

Northrup, K., "Lyric Scholarship in Controversy: Jan Zwicky and Anne Carson." Studies in Canadian Literature 37.1 (2012). Print.

Rajan, T., "Excitability: The (Dis)Organization of Knowledge from Schelling’s First Outline (1799) to Ages of the World (1815)." Romanticism and Modernity. Ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert Mitchell. New York: Routledge, 2012. 47-64. Print.

Rajan, T., "Romanticism and the Unfinished Project of Deconstruction." European Romantic Review, 23:3 (2012): 293-303. Print.

Saint-Amour, P.K., Groden, M., Shloss, C., Spoo, R., “James Joyce: Copyright, Fair Use, and Permissions: Frequently Asked Questions. The International James Joyce Foundation: Special Panel on Intellectual Property. May 2012. Web.

Stuart, T., "Recurring Dreams: Haunting Fantasy in John Fowles’ The Magus" in "Curious, if True": The Fantastic in Literature edited by Amy Bright. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 243-269. Print.

Taylor, C., "Shadows and Mysteries: Illusions of Imagined Communities in  Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines." History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction. Ed. Chitra Sankaran. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. 79-93. Print.

Wenaus, A., "‘Spells Out The Word of Itself, and Then Dispelling Itself’: The Chaotics of Memory and The Ghost of the Novel in Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 23.2 (2012): 260-284. Print.

Wenaus, A., “Rhizomatic Horror: Eclipsed Narrative and Experimental Weird Fiction in Steve Beard’s Digital Leatherette”. Extrapolation 53.1 (2012): 1-23. Print.

Wennekers, M.E., "Genre, Non-correspondency, and the Fantastic Real in The Hound of the Baskervilles"  in "Curious, if True": The Fantastic in Literature edited by Amy Bright. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK:  Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 42-65. Print.

2011

Books

Elegies
Professor Madeline Bassnett | 2011
Frog Hollow Press

Elegies address death and illness, and are primarily texts of feeling: harrowing word-borne devices that wrest the perspective of emotion from experience. Professor Bassnett’s poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Room of One’s Own and echolocation. In 2010, she was shortlisted for the Winston Collins/Descant Prize.

2010

Books

Romantic Narrative
Professor Tilottama Rajan | 2010
John Hopkins University Press

Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, in Romantic Narrative noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation of narrative itself with the governmental apparatus of the Novel.

2009

Books

The Year's Work in Medievalism, 2008
Professor Jane Toswell | 2009
WIPF and STOCK

The Year's Work in Medievalism 2008 includes papers delivered at the 22nd Annual conference on Medievalism, organized by the International Society for Studies in Medievalism, and held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada on 4-7 October 2007. The topic of the conference was "Neomedievalisms" and these papers address various aspects of the term, including its definition, range, and application.

Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance
Professor Kim Solga | 2009
Palgrave Macmillan

Kim Solga explores the significance of rape and domestic violence against women around the turn of the seventeenth century in England, its pernicious erasure in the period's cultural representations, the framing and negotiation of that erasure a selection of Shakespeare's plays, which are some of the most iconic texts in English theatre history.

The Spread of Novels
Professor Mary Helen McMurran | 2009
Princeton University Press

Mary Helen McMurran explores the active movements of English and French fiction in the eighteenth century and argues that the new literary form of the novel was the result of a shift in translation.

2008

Books

Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement
Professor Nandi Bhatia | 2008
Pearson Education India

Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement features fifteen essays co-edited by Nandi Bhatia and Anjali Gera Roy that focus on personal, subjective experiences of Partition, rather than on official accounts. The book analyses fiction, films, and biographical and autobiographical accounts relating to the experience and influence of Partition. It also studies Partition-related migrations not only to and from West Pakistan, East Pakistan, and India, but also to the West. The essays also attempt to show how Partition continues to influence cultural identities both in the subcontinent and among the diaspora, through analyses of recent films and fiction focusing on ideas of home, homelessness, martyrdom, etc.

Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation
Professor Margaret Jane Kidnie | 2008
Routledge

Shakespeare’s plays continue to be circulated on a massive scale in a variety of guises – as editions, performances, and adaptations – and it is by means of such mediation that we come to know his drama. M.J. Kidnie addresses fundamental questions about this process of mediation, making use of the fraught category of adaptation to explore how we currently understand the Shakespearean work.

2004

Books

Genetic Criticism - Texts and Avant-textes
Michael Groden | 2004
University of Pennsylvania Press

This volume introduces English speakers to genetic criticism, arguably the most important critical movement in France today. Genetic Criticism contains translations of eleven essays, general theoretical analyses as well as studies of individual authors such as Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Zola, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Montaigne. Some of the essays are foundational statements, while others deal with such recent topics as noncanonical texts and the potential impact of hypertext on genetic study. A general introduction to the book traces genetic criticism's intellectual history, and separate introductions give precise contexts for each essay.

2003

Books

Paradise Lost
Professor John Leonard | 2003
Penguin Classics

In Paradise Lost Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties - blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration and briefly in danger of execution - Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence towards authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to 'justify the ways of God to men', or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.

John Milton (1608-1674) spent his early years in scholarly pursuit. In 1649 he took up the cause for the new Commonwealth, defending the English revolution both in English and Latin - and sacrificing his eyesight in the process. He risked his life by publishing The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth on the eve of the Restoration (1660). His great poems were published after this political defeat.

2000

Books

Paradise Lost
Professor John Leonard | 2000
Penguin Classics

John Leonard’s revised edition of Paradise Lost contains full notes, elucidating Milton’s biblical, classical and historical allusions and discussing his vivid, highly original use of language and blank verse.