Imperfect Present

Imperfect Present is a book for our current moment. By confronting the urgencies of daily life, from questions of identity to sexual abuse to racial unrest to the ubiquity of plastic, these poems investigate ways to sustain ourselves in our fraught public and private lives. With her characteristic linguistic play, Sharon Dolin illuminates some of the most personal concerns that resonate throughout our culture and in ourselves, such as error, despair, uncertainty, and doubt. In sections that deploy the lens of art, the “Oblique Strategies” of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and meditations on dreams and spirituality, Imperfect Present provides a panoply of approaches that grapple with the complexity of now.

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the 'new' nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa's literature, it understands 'disappointment' both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Attending to contemporary writers' treatment of temporality, genre, and form, it considers a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture-including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers - some known to international Anglophone readers including J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoë Wicomb, some slightly less well-known including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach, and others from a new generation including Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga. It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as 'South African' in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.

The Chronicle of Morea, one of the most important and controversial historical narratives written in the late Middle Ages, tells the story of the formation and government by the Villehardouin dynasty of a remarkably successful Crusader State following the conquest by western invaders of the capital - Constantinople - and the provinces of the Byzantine Empire. By examining all the Chronicle's surviving Greek, French, Spanish and Italian versions, this study, the first of its kind, explores in depth the literary and ideological contexts in which the work was composed, transmitted and re-written. The result is a fascinating analysis of cultural exchange in a rich and vibrant eastern Mediterranean world where different ethnicities were obliged to live alongside each other, and outside political interests frequently intruded in dramatic fashion. Translations into English have been provided of all the material discussed.

Long trusted as the most comprehensive, up-to-date and user-friendly grammar available, French Grammar and Usage is a complete guide to French as it is written and spoken today. It includes clear descriptions of all the main grammatical phenomena of French, and their use, illustrated by numerous examples taken from contemporary French, and distinguishes the most common forms of usage, both formal and informal. Key features include: Comprehensive content, covering all the major structures of contemporary French User-friendly organisation offering easy-to-find sections with cross-referencing and indexes of English words, French words and grammatical terms Clear and illuminating examples help students at all stage of their degree Useful indications of what cannot be said as well as what can Revised and updated throughout, this new edition offers updated examples to reflect current usage, new headers to include chapter number and section parts as well as enhanced cross-referencing for easier reference and expanded and more nuanced explanations of notoriously difficult points of grammar. The combination of reference grammar and manual of current usage is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of French at the intermediate to advanced levels. This Grammar is accompanied by the Practising French Grammar: A Workbook (ISBN 978-1-13-885119-1) which features related exercises and activities and a companion website offering additional resources at www.routledge.com/cw/hawkins .