Atlantic Afterlives In Contemporary Fiction

Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction offers fresh readings of what has been called "transatlantic literature". In selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts it discovers a shift from oceanic, place-based knowledge to an atmospheric, placeless circulation of information. Consonant with the displacements of the Information Age, this book reads contemporary narrative as it imagines and navigates today's virtual spaces. An important conclusion of the book is that intellectual resources are finite and should be used sustainably. Thus, arguing against a conventional comparative approach, this book proposes reading practices that resist the tendency toward an oversupply of reworked literary contexts that seems bent on matching the reach of the World Wide Web. Instead, the book reimagines place as a practice in the way it is communicated and narrated. Ultimately, this book empowers the reader to reimagine a future for narrative in the Information Age.

Taking up the idea that teaching is a political act, this collection of essays reflects on recent trends in ecocriticism and the implications for pedagogy. Focusing on a diverse set of literature and media, the book also provides background on historical and theoretical issues that animate the field of postcolonial ecocriticism. The scope is broad, encompassing not only the Global South but also parts of the Global North that have been subject to environmental degradation as a result of colonial practices. Considering both the climate crisis and the crisis in the humanities, the volume navigates theoretical resources, contextual scaffolding, classroom activities, assessment, and pedagogical possibilities and challenges. Essays are grounded in environmental justice and the project to decolonize the classroom, addressing works from Africa, New Zealand, Asia, and Latin America and issues such as queer ecofeminism, disability, Latinx literary production, animal studies, interdisciplinarity, and working with environmental justice organizations.

This book argues that cosmopolitanism was a feature of early American discourses of nation formation and eighteenth-century colonialism. With the analysis of writings by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Philip Mazzei, and Olaudah Equiano, the book reassesses the terms in which we understand cosmopolitanism, its relationship with local and transatlantic environments, and the way these representative writers from different segments of colonial society identified themselves and America within the transatlantic context. The book shows that the transnational and universalist appeal of the cosmopolitan not only accompanies empire building and defines a narrative that aligns the cosmopolitan perspective of global understanding and cooperation with western political ideology. The language of the cosmopolitan also forms the basis of a rhetoric that resists imperial expansion and allows writers in a variety of cultural, social, and political margins to find a voice to identify themselves, America, and the transatlantic world they imagine.

Afterlife and Narrative explores why life after death is such a potent cultural concept today, and why it is such an attractive prospect for modern fiction. The book mines a rich vein of imagined afterlives, from the temporal experiments of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow to narration from heaven in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones .

Water is a symbol of life, wisdom, fertility, purity, and death. Water also sustains and nourishes, irrigates our crops, keeps us clean and healthy, and contributes to our energy needs. But a strain has been put on our water resources as increased energy demands combine with the effects of climate change to create a treacherous environment. Individuals and communities around the globe increasingly face droughts, floods, water pollution, water scarcity, and even water wars. We tend to address and solve these concerns through scientific and technological innovations, but social and cultural analyses and solutions are needed as well. In this edited collection, contributors tackle current water issues in the era of climate change using a wide variety of recent literature and film. At its core, this collection demonstrates that water is an immense reservoir of artistic potential and an agent of historical and cultural exchange. Creating familiar and relatable contexts for water dilemmas, authors and directors of contemporary literary texts and films present compelling stories of our relationships to water, water health, ecosystems, and conservation. They also explore how global water problems affect local communities around the world and intersect with social and cultural aspects such as health, citizenship, class, gender, race, and ethnicity. This transformative work highlights the cultural significance of water—the source of life and a powerful symbol in numerous cultures. It also raises awareness about global water debates and crises.

This volume studies the enigmatic but silent heroines Nabokov brings to the page. Chapter 4, "Nabokov's Mermaid: 'Spring in Fialta'" by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, is not available in the ebook format due to digital rights restrictions. You can find the earlier version of the chapter in the journal Nabokov Studies.

Winner, 2021 René Wellek Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award, given by the International Society for the Study of Narrative Honorable Mention, 2020 James Russell Lowell Prize, given by the Modern Language Association Argues that the slave narrative is a new world literary genre In Runaway Genres, Yogita Goyal tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. The post-black satire of Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson, modern slave narratives from Sudan to Sierra Leone, and the new Afropolitan diaspora of writers like Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie all are woven into Goyal’s argument for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of this new ethical globalism. From the humanitarian spectacles of Kony 2012 and #BringBackOurGirls through gothic literature, Runaway Genres unravels, for instance, how and why the African child soldier has now appeared as the afterlife of the Atlantic slave. Goyal argues that in order to fathom forms of freedom and bondage today—from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to genocide—we must turn to contemporary literature, which reveals how the literary forms used to tell these stories derive from the antebellum genre of the slave narrative. Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, the book presents alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offers not just an occasion to revisit the Atlantic past, but also for re-narrating the global present. In reassessing these legacies and their ongoing relation to race and the human, Runaway Genres creates a new map with which to navigate contemporary black diaspora literature.