The Home Place
1,050.00₹ 890.00₹
Reproduced from the 1948 edition of The Home Place, the Bison Book edition brings back into print an important early work by one of the most highly regarded of contemporary American Writers.
This account in first-person narrative and photographs of the one-day visit of Clyde Muncy to “the home place” at Lone Tree, Nebraska, has been called “as near to a new fiction form as you could get.” Both prose and pictures are homely: worn linoleum, an old man’s shoes, well-used kitchen utensils, and weathered siding. Muncy’s journey of discovery takes the measure of the man he has become and of what he has left behind.
The Merchant’s Prologue and Tale
1,190.00₹ 895.00₹
Six-hundred-year-old tales with modern relevance. As well as the complete text of the Merchant’s Prologue and Tale, the student will find illustrated information on Chaucer’s world, including a map of the Canterbury pilgrimage, a running synopsis of the action, an explanation of unfamiliar words, and a wide range of classroom-tested activities to help bring the text to life. Guided by the suggestions for study and the wide range of helpful information, students will readily appreciate Chaucer’s wit and sense of irony, his love of controversy and his delight in character portrayal.
The Merchant’s Prologue and Tale
1,295.00₹ 510.00₹
A well-established and respected series. Texts are in the original Middle English, and each has an introduction, detailed notes and a glossary. Selected titles are also available as CD recordings.
The Overseer’s Cabin
1,390.00₹ 990.00₹
With Édouard Glissant’s The Fourth Century, the Village Voice observed, “we get the full effect of his overarching project: a literary exorcism of Martinique’s scarred psyche and past, a lingering cry against the ‘black hole of time and forgetting.’” Glissant, “one of the most significant figures in Caribbean literature” (Washington Post), continues that project in The Overseer’s Cabin, conjuring in one woman’s story centuries knotted together by unknown blood, voiceless suffering, and death without echo.
Beginning with the birth in 1928 of Mycea, the last of the intertwining ancestral families introduced in The Fourth Century, and ending with her release from an asylum in 1978, the novel moves back and forth across a framework that weaves the story of Mycea’s family against the legacy of Martinique as an island whose history and indigenous people have all but been erased. From the beginnings of Mycea’s family in the tale of two blood brothers, both named Odono, to its ending with the fate of her two sons, the novel encapsulates the island’s destiny in one Martinican woman’s plight. With the past irretrievable and the future in doubt, Mycea journeys inward, finding in her connection to the land of Martinique, and to the seafloor littered with drowned slaves, a reality, and a possibility, uncolonized by others’ history.
The Song of the Lark
1,590.00₹ 1,090.00₹
Willa Cather’s third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg, a character inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad. Thea’s early life, however, has much in common with Cather’s own.
Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea’s long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House. As she makes her way in the world from an unlikely background, Thea distills all her experiences and relationships into the power and passion of her singing, despite the cost. The Song of the Lark presents Cather’s vision of a true artist.
The Story of ‘A ‘
2,130.00₹ 1,390.00₹
The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance.
Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet’s tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as “A is for apple.” The new market for children’s books in the eighteenth century established for the “republic of ABC” a cultural potency equivalent to its high-culture counterpart, the “republic of letters,” while shaping its child-readers into consumers. As a central rite of socialization, alphabetization schooled children to conflicting expectations, as well as to changing models of authority, understandings of the world, and uses of literature.
The Year 3000: A Dream
1,300.00₹ 1,090.00₹
First published in 1897, The Year 3000 is the most daring and original work of fiction by the prominent Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza. A futuristic utopian novel, the book follows two young lovers who, as they travel from Rome to the capital of the United Planetary States to celebrate their “mating union,” encounter the marvels of cultural and scientific advances along the way. Intriguing in itself, The Year 3000 is also remarkable for both its vision of the future (predicting an astonishing array of phenomena from airplanes, artificial intelligence, CAT scans, and credit cards to controversies surrounding divorce, abortion, and euthanasia) and the window it opens on fin de siècle Europe.
Published here for the first time in English, this richly annotated edition features an invaluable introductory essay that interprets the intertextual and intercultural connections within and beyond Mantegazza’s work. For its critical contribution to early science fiction and for its insights into the hopes, fears, and clash of values in the Western world of both Mantegazza’s time and our own, this book belongs among the visionary giants of speculative literature.
These Were the Sioux
840.00₹ 690.00₹
“The Sioux Indians came into my life before I had any preconceived notions about them,” writes Mari Sandoz about the visitors to her family homestead in the Sandhills of Nebraska when she was a child. These Were the Sioux, written in her last decade, takes the reader far inside a world of rituals surrounding puberty, courtship, and marriage, as well as the hunt and the battle.
Translation and Opposition
3,490.00₹ 1,300.00₹
Translation and Opposition is an edited volume that brings together cultural and sociological perspectives by examining translation through the prism of linguistic/cultural hybridity and inter/intra-social agency. In a collection of diverse case studies, ranging from the translation of political texts to interpreting in concentration camps, the book explores issues of power struggle, ideology, censorship and identity construction. The contributors to the volume show how translators, interpreters and subtitlers as mediators put their specific professional and ethical competences to the test by treading the dividing lines between constellations of ‘in-groups’ and cultural or political ‘others’.
Translation and Opposition
3,490.00₹ 1,300.00₹
Translation and Opposition is an edited volume that brings together cultural and sociological perspectives by examining translation through the prism of linguistic/cultural hybridity and inter/intra-social agency. In a collection of diverse case studies, ranging from the translation of political texts to interpreting in concentration camps, the book explores issues of power struggle, ideology, censorship and identity construction. The contributors to the volume show how translators, interpreters and subtitlers as mediators put their specific professional and ethical competences to the test by treading the dividing lines between constellations of ‘in-groups’ and cultural or political ‘others’.
Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific
3,090.00₹ 2,880.00₹
The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented migration and interaction for Asian, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultures in the Americas and the American Pacific. Some of these ethnic groups already had historic ties, but technology, migration, and globalization during the twentieth century brought them into even closer contact. Transnational Crossroads explores and triangulates for the first time the interactions and contacts among these three cultural groups that were brought together by the expanding American empire from 1867 to 1950.
Through a comparative framework, this volume weaves together narratives of U.S. and Spanish empire, globalization, resistance, and identity, as well as social, labor, and political movements. Contributors examine multiethnic celebrities and key figures, migratory paths, cultural productions, and social and political formations among these three groups. Engaging multiple disciplines and methodologies, these studies of Asian American, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultural interactions explode traditional notions of ethnic studies and introduce new approaches to transnational and comparative studies of the Americas and the American Pacific.
Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature
3,753.00₹ 3,150.00₹
African and Caribbean peoples share a history dominated by the violent disruptions of slavery and colonialism. While much has been said about these “geographies of pain,” violence in the private sphere, particularly gendered violence, receives little attention. This book fills that void. It is a critical addition to the study of African and Caribbean women’s literatures at a time when women from these regions are actively engaged in articulating the ways in which colonial and postcolonial violence impact women.
Chantal Kalisa examines the ways in which women writers lift taboos imposed on them by their society and culture and challenge readers with their unique perspectives on violence. Comparing women from different places and times, Kalisa treats types of violence such as colonial, familial, linguistic, and war-related, specifically linked to dictatorship and genocide. She examines Caribbean writers Michele Lacrosil, Simone Schwartz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau, and Edwidge Danticat, and Africans Ken Begul, Calixthe Beyala, Nadine Bar, and Monique Ilboudo. She also includes Sembène Ousmane and Frantz Fanon for their unique contributions to the questions of violence and gender. This study advances our understanding of the attempts of African and Caribbean women writers to resolve the tension between external forms of violence and internal forms resulting from skewed cultural, social, and political rules based on gender.
Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and Misbehavior
1,190.00₹ 950.00₹
“Doing things by the book” acquires a whole new meaning in Brandon R. Schrand’s memoir of coming of age in spite of himself. The “works cited” are those books that serve as Schrand’s signposts as he goes from life as a hormone-crazed, heavy-metal wannabe in the remotest parts of working-class Idaho to a reasonable facsimile of manhood (with a stop along the way to buy a five-dollar mustard-colored M. C. Hammer suit, so he’ll fit in at college). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn informs his adolescent angst over the perceived injustice of society’s refusal to openly discuss boners. The Great Gatsby serves as a metaphor for his indulgent and directionless college days spent in a drunken stupor (when he wasn’t feigning interest in Mormonism to attract women). William Kittredge’s Hole in the Sky parallels his own dangerous adulthood slide into alcoholism and denial.
With a finely calibrated wit, a good dose of humility, and a strong supporting cast of literary characters, Schrand manages to chart his own story—about a dreamer thrown out of school as many times as he’s thrown into jail—until he finally sticks his landing.
Writers in Conflict in Sixteenth-Century France
4,500.00₹ 1,190.00₹
These essays written to celebrate the distinguished career of Renassiance scholar, Professor Malcolm Quainton, confirm the idea that the sixteenth-century in France was deeply marked by conflict, but readers expecting to find a volume wholly devoted to studies of war and religious disputation will be intrigued to discover that these rare not the only topics discussed.
A number of subtle analyses reveal the stresses of internal conflict experienced by writers and woven into the fabric of their compositions. The three sections focus respectively on living and writing in conflict, the Wars of Religion, and intertextuality as conflict. Subjects include Ronard, Baïf, Du Bellay, D’Aubigné, sonnets by Mary Queen of Scots and the political role of court festivities, while a previously unknown riposte to Clément Marot is first published here.
This book will appeal to scholars and students of French language, literature and culture, and sixteenth-century European history.
Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology
4,190.00₹ 3,500.00₹
While some cultural critics are pronouncing the death of the novel, a whole generation of novelists have turned to other media with curiosity rather than fear. These novelists are not simply incorporating references to other media into their work for the sake of verisimilitude, they are also engaging precisely such media as a way of talking about what it means to write and read narrative in a society filled with stories told outside the print medium.
By examining how some of our best fiction writers have taken up the challenge of film, television, video games, and hypertext, Daniel Punday offers an enlightening look into the current status of such fundamental narrative concepts as character, plot, and setting. He considers well-known postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, more-accessible authors like Maxine Hong Kingston and Oscar Hijuelos, and unjustly overlooked writers like Susan Daitch and Kenneth Gangemi, and asks how their works investigate the nature and limits of print as a medium for storytelling.
Writing at the Limit explores how novelists locate print writing within the contemporary media ecology, and what it really means to be writing at print’s media limit.
You Know what I Mean?
1,750.00₹ 1,590.00₹
Does a word mean what it says? Sometimes – but not always. Everyone thinks that meaning is contained within words – like sardines in a tin, or milk in a bottle. After all, words are nice stable things that you can look up in a dictionary aren’t they? But dictionaries only take us so far… If you eavesdropped on a teenage conversation, rushing to a dictionary – with its definitions frozen in time – wouldn’t help much. Who’s using a word and to whom, in what context, for what purpose – all these influence the meaning of the language we use. The word’s origins and history (its ‘genetics’) also help. Try teaching yourself another language from a phrasebook and you’ll soon learn that you can be correct, in the formal sense, but still way behind the times in reality. In this book Wajnryb considers these and other questions to explore how and why our language works the way it does.
- Offers a fresh approach to thinking about language
- Includes lots of contemporary references and examples to illustrate points
- Each section is self-contained so readers can browse rather than read from cover to cover
