Life After Literature

This book offers innovative investigations of the concept of life in art and in theory. It features essays that explore biopoetics and look at how insights from the natural sciences shape research within the humanities. Since literature, works of art, and other cultural products decisively shape our ideas of what it means to be human, the contributors to this volume examine the question of what literature, literary and cultural criticism, and philosophy contribute to the distinctions (or non-distinctions) between human, animal, and vegetal existence. Coverage combines different methodological aspects and addresses a wide field of comparative literary studies. The essays consider the question of language (as a distinctive feature of human existence) in a number of different contexts, which range from Aristotle’s works, through several historical layers of the philosophical discourse on the origins of speech, to modern anthropology, and 20th century continental philosophy. In addition, the volume includes concrete case studies to the current post-humanism debate and provides literary, art historian, and philosophical perspectives on animal studies. The historical multiplicity of the various cultural representations of biological existence (be that human, animal, vegetal, or mixed) might serve as a productive foundation for discussing the nature and forms of literature’s critical contributions to our understanding of these fundamental categories. This volume opens up this subject to students and scholars of literature, art, philosophy, ethics, and cultural studies, and to anyone with a theoretical interest in the questions of life.

Thousands of students graduate from university each year. The lucky few have the rest of their lives mapped out in perfect detail - but for most things are not nearly so simple. Armed with your hard-earned degree the possibilities and career paths lying before you are limitless, and the number of choices you suddenly have to make can seem bewildering. Life After a Languages and Literature Degree has been written specifically to help students currently studying, or who have recently graduated, make informed choices about their future. It will be source of invaluable advice and wisdom to graduates on where their degree can take them, covering such topics as: Identifying a career path that interests you – from journalism to interpretation Seeking out an opportunity that matches your skills and aspirations Staying motivated and pursuing your goals Networking and self-promotion Making the transition from scholar to worker The Life After University series of books are more than simple ‘career guides’. They are unique in taking a holistic approach to career advice – recognising the increasing view that, although a successful working life is vitally important, other factors can be just as essential to happiness and fulfilment. They are the indispensable handbooks for students considering their future direction.

Satan, Judas, a Soviet writer, and a talking black cat named Behemoth populate this satire, “a classic of twentieth-century fiction” (The New York Times). In 1930s Moscow, Satan decides to pay the good people of the Soviet Union a visit. In old Jerusalem, the fateful meeting of Pilate and Yeshua and the murder of Judas in the garden of Gethsemane unfold. At the intersection of fantasy and realism, satire and unflinching emotional truths, Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic The Master and Margarita eloquently lampoons every aspect of Soviet life under Stalin’s regime, from politics to art to religion, while interrogating the complexities between good and evil, innocence and guilt, and freedom and oppression. Spanning from Moscow to Biblical Jerusalem, a vibrant cast of characters—a “magician” who is actually the devil in disguise, a giant cat, a witch, a fanged assassin—sow mayhem and madness wherever they go, mocking artists, intellectuals, and politicians alike. In and out of the fray weaves a man known only as the Master, a writer demoralized by government censorship, and his mysterious lover, Margarita. Burned in 1928 by the author and restarted in 1930, The Master and Margarita was Bulgakov’s last completed creative work before his death. It remained unpublished until 1966—and went on to become one of the most well-regarded works of Russian literature of the twentieth century, adapted or referenced in film, television, radio, comic strips, theater productions, music, and opera.

Poetry of life in literature and through literature, and the vast territory in between - as vast as human life itself - where they interact and influence each other, is the nerve of human existence. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are profoundly dissatisfied with the stark reality of life's swift progress onward, and the enigmatic and irretrievable meaning of the past. And so we dramatise our existence, probing deeply for a lyrical and heartfelt yet universally valid sense of our experience. It is in great works of literature that we seek those hidden springs that so move us. It is in honour of this search that this collection focuses on the creative imagination at work in literature and aesthetics.

Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer wishes to offer a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that they have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to any central motive. Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like this relation and this allegiance.

FAIRY TALES AND MYTHS have enriched childhood for centuries. In between “Once upon a time” and “happily ever after” we embark on adventures that seem an eternity away from our everyday lives. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, journey through a treasury of beloved fables and folk tales and discover the wisdom hiding within. In an age that rejects moral absolutes, children’s literature restores the meaning of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, normal and abnormal—and helps us see the nature of our world more clearly than we ever have before.