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A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries is a subseries of Avant-Garde Critical Studies providing a comprehensive overview and in-depth analysis of the cultural manifestations of the avant-garde in the Nordic countries from 1900-2010s.
Due to its success and the continued need to decenter the avant-garde we are continuing the format of the Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in a Companion Series, poignantly called: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde: A Companion Series. Here you can explore more regions covered.
Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change investigates the evolving nature of postcolonial literary criticism in response to global, regional, and local environmental transformations brought about by climate change. It builds upon, and extends, previous studies in postcolonial ecocriticism to demonstrate how the growing awareness of human-caused global warming has begun to permeate literary consciousness, praxis and analysis. The breadth of the volume’s coverage – the diversity of its focal locations, cultures, genres and texts – serves as a salient reminder that, while climate change is global, its impacts vary, effecting peoples from place to place unequally, and often in accordance with their particular historical experience of colonialism and neo-colonialism, as well as their ongoing marginalisations.

“Demonstrating the urgency of invoking novel epistemological approaches combining the scientific and the imaginative, this book is a “must read” for those concerned about the present and potential impacts of climate change on formerly colonised areas of the world. The comprehensive and illuminating Introduction offers a crucial history and current state of postcolonial ecocriticism as it has been and is addressing climate crises.”
- Helen Tiffin, University of Wollongong

“The broad focus on the polar regions, the Pacific and the Caribbean – with added essays on environmental justice/activism in India and Egypt – opens up rich terrain for examination under the rubric of postcolonial and ecocritical analysis, not only expanding recent studies in this field but also enabling new comparisons and conceptual linkages.” - Helen Gilbert, Royal Holloway, University of London

“The subject is topical and vital and will become even more so as the problem of how to reconcile the demands of climate change with the effects on regions and individual nations already damaged by the economic effects of colonisation and the subsequent inequalities resulting from neo-colonialism continues to grow.” - Gareth Griffiths, Em. Prof. University of Western Australia

Volume Editors: and
The concept of framing has long intrigued and troubled scholars in fields including philosophy, rhetoric, media studies and literary criticism. But framing also has rich implications for environmental debate, urging us to reconsider how we understand the relationship between humans and their ecological environment, culture and nature.
The contributors to this wide-ranging volume use the concept of framing to engage with key questions in environmental literature, history, politics, film, TV, and pedagogy. In so doing, they show that framing can serve as a valuable analytical tool connecting different academic discourses within the emergent interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities. No less importantly, they demonstrate how increased awareness of framing strategies and framing effects can help us move society in a more sustainable direction.
Author:
One can find it in the classics of experimental literature such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, but also in the horror and fantasy fiction of Stephen King, in Mel Brooks’s spoof films and Grant Morrison’s superhero comics. The talk is of metalepsis, the transgression of narrative levels. While this device was long perceived as a narratological oddity reserved for avant-garde texts, it has recently emerged as a phenomenon of much wider bearing that exists in numerous media and in popular as well as high culture. When Storyworlds Collide wishes to do justice to this situation and offers both a refined model for the analysis of metalepsis across media and a detailed investigation of the uses and functions of metalepsis in popular culture, thus providing a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of post-classical and transmedial narrative theory.
Starting from a thorough reevaluation of the concept of metalepsis as it is discussed both in classical narratology and more recent endeavours, this book puts forth a deceptively simple yet flexible definition and typology of this device, centred on the violation of the border separating the inside and outside of a storyworld and designed to be transmedially applicable. In a second step, this model is put to the test through an analysis of a wide range of metaleptic narratives drawn from popular fiction, film, and comics. When Storyworlds Collide takes popular culture seriously, employing it neither to merely exemplify theory nor to demonstrate that it is ultimately a knockoff of high culture. Rather, it shows that metalepsis possesses a unique dynamics in popular storytelling and has become an essential device for pop-cultural self-reflection – while still retaining an immense potential to create amusing and entertaining narratives.
This book will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: narrative theory, intermediality and media studies, popular culture as well as literary, film and comics studies.
The Neo-Victorian Series aims to analyse the complex revival, re-vision and recycling of the long nineteenth century in the cultural imaginary. This contemporary phenomenon will be examined in its diverse British and worldwide, postcolonial and neo-colonial contexts, as well as its manifold forms, including literature, the arts, film, television, and virtual media. To assess such simultaneous artistic regeneration and retrogressive innovation and to tackle the ethical debate and ideological consequences of these re-appropriations will constitute the main challenges of this series.

Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals to the publisher at BRILL, Christa Stevens.
Volume Editors: and
Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities takes a transnational and transcultural approach to exile and its capacities to alter the ways we think about place and identity in the contemporary world. The edited collection brings together researchers on exile in international perspective from three continents who explore questions of exilic identity along multiple geopolitical and cultural axes—Cuba, the USA and Australia; Colombia and the USA; Algeria and France; Italy, France and Mexico; non-Han minorities and Han majorities in China; China, Tibet and India; Japan and China; New Caledonia, Vietnam and France; Hungary, the USSR, and Australia; and Germany, before and after unification. The international and crosscultural span of this collection represents an important addition to the fields of exile criticism and cultural identity studies. Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities will be of interest to readers, scholars and students of exile, diasporic and transmigration studies, international studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, language studies, and comparative literary studies.
Editor:
The electronic version of the Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race series.
Thamyris seeks to initiate alternative forms of criticism by analysing the ways in which cultural and theoretical discourses intervene in the contemporary world. This criticism should pursue a re-politicizing and remobilizing of theoretical perspectives and cultural practices, preferably through case studies. Thamyris hopes to contribute to the productive interaction between art, activism, and theory. We understand cultural practices to include those of literary, visual, digital, and performance arts, but also social practices related to gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. In short, Thamyris aims at exploring the ways in which varying cultural practices, separately or in interaction, can be effective as agents of social and cultural change.
This collection of essays explores the significance of modern chaos theory as a new paradigm in literary studies and argues for the usefulness of borrowings from one discipline to another. Its thesis is that external reality is real and is not merely a social construct. On the other hand, this volume reflects the belief that literature, as a social and cultural construct, is not unrelated to that external reality. The authors represented here furthermore believe that learning to communicate across disciplinary divides is worth the risk of looking silly to purists and dogmatists. In applying a contemporary scientific grid to a by-gone era, the authors play out Steven Weinberg's exhortation to mind the clues to the past that cannot be obtained in any other way. It is of course necessary to get the science right, yet the essays in this collection do not seek to do science, but rather to suggest that science and literature often share common assumptions and realities. Thus there is no attempt to legitimize literary study through the adoption of a scientific approach. Interaction between the disciplines requires mutual respect and a willingness to investigate the broader implications of scientific research. Consequently, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the long eighteenth century whether the focus is on England (Locke, Milton, Radcliffe, Lewis), France (Crébillion, Diderot, Marivaux, Montesquieu) or Germany (Kant, Moritz, Goethe, Fr. Schlegel). Moreover, given its multiple thrust in employing mythological, philosophical, and scientific notions of chaos, this volume will appeal to historians and philosophers of the European Enlightenment as well as to literary historians. The volume ultimately aspires to promote communication across centuries and across disciplines.
This volume deals with the inherent relation between literary genres and cultural memory. Indeed, generic repertoires may be regarded as bodies of shared knowledge (a sort of ‘encyclopaedia' or 'museum' of stocked culture) and have played and still play an important role in absorbing and activating that memory. The contributors have focused on some specific memory-linked genres that prove especially relevant in remembering and transforming past experiences, i.e. the (post)modern historical novel and various forms of (post)modern autobiographical writing. They deal with such renowned authors as Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco, Antonio Tabucchi, John Barth, Julian Barnes, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Georges Perec and Marguerite Yourcenar. The volume, thus, constitutes an attractive and representative sample of (post)modern forms of rewriting and problematizing individual and collective pasts.
Volume Editors: and
The present volume is the product of a joint effort made by scholars from across China (including Hong Kong), Japan and Europe. The book gathers sixteen papers devoted to literary and cultural criticism from a comparative point of view.
A perspective prominent in this volume is imagology, an approach first developed by Daniel-Henry Pageaux, and which focuses on specific images in literary and other texts. The study of the image of the “foreign” in national literary traditions, for instance, belongs to the traditional purview of comparative literature. Pageaux did more than uphold this tradition. He practically reinvented it using new theoretical concepts and perspectives (in particular, semiotics and reception aesthetics). On this basis, he was able to develop a theory and a methodology that are both usable and in tune with contemporary concerns.
The present book covers a wide range of topics in the study of images of Westerners in Chinese and Japanese literature. Individual contributions deal with issues such as the genesis of the Chinese term Foreign Devil, the occurrence of Westerners in modern Chinese and Japanese literature, and the Chinese and Japanese reception of indiviual western authors and artists such as, amongst others, Oscar Wilde, Vincent Van Gogh, and Madame Roland. Some papers examine individual authors such as Lu Xun and Takeyama Michio. Others examine historical periods or literary movements. The approaches followed range from historical investigations of linguistic practices to detailed literary analyses.