Text And Nation

Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on National and Cultural Identities consists of eleven articles that address how struggles to demarcate the borderlines of nations affect texts and how these texts are, in turn, narrated in them. Written by eminent scholars from African American Studies, Art History, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, English, French, German, Government, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Spanish, the essays explore relationships between national identity and textual genres of literature, music, the visual arts, and language policies. The volume places particular emphasis on the need to understand how the end of the Cold War has affected our interpretation of national and cultural identities. It provides a combination of textual analyses with an invitation to move the interpretive enterprise across the disciplines.

This collection explores the multifarious manifestations of gender intrinsic to national ideologies, the use of gender in the construction and development of nation states, and the role of political, literary, and cinematographic discourses in cultural debates that define national and international borders in post-colonial societies. The selected essays focus primarily on Europe and Latin America and consider the implications of colonialism, dictatorship, and the transition to democracy on national identities as well as the deliberate use of gendered language and images in the development of discourses of hegemony, frequently used to underpin support for individual political regimes, or as a call to arms to defend national patrimony. (Series: Cultural Studies / Kulturwissenschaft / Estudios Culturales / Etudes Culturelles, Vol. 55) [Subject: Gender Studies, Politics, Sociology, Cultural Studies]

Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies is the first collection of cultural studies from Australia, selected and introduced for an international readership. Participating in the `de-centring' of cultural studies - considering what perspectives other than the European and the American have to offer - the contributors raise important issues about the role of a national tradition of critical theory, and about the cultural specificity of theory itself. A key theme is the place of the postcolonial nation within contemporary cultural theory - particularly those aspects of contemporary theory which see the category of contemporary theory which see the category of the nation as either outdated or suspect. The writers tackle subjects ranging from the televising of the Bicentennial to the role of policy in film, television and the heritage industry, from the use of video technologies with remote Aboriginal communities to the role of ethnography in cultural studies.

Many non-Indian readers find the historical and cultural references in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children demanding. In his close reading of the novel, Neil ten Kortenaar offers post-colonial literary strategies for understanding Midnight's Children that also challenge some of the prevailing interpretations of the novel. Using hybridity, mimicry, national allegory, and cosmopolitanism, all key critical concepts of postcolonial theory, ten Kortenaar reads Midnight's Children as an allegory of history, as a Bildungsroman and psychological study of a burgeoning national consciousness, and as a representation of the nation. He shows that the hybridity of Rushdie's fictional India is not created by different elements forming a whole but by the relationship among them. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children also makes an original argument about how nation-states are imagined and how national consciousness is formed in the citizen. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, heroically identifies himself with the state, but this identification is beaten out of him until, in the end, he sees himself as the Common Man at the mercy of the state. Ten Kortenaar reveals Rushdie's India to be more self-conscious than many communal identities based on language: it is an India haunted by a dark twin called Pakistan; a nation in the way England is a nation but imagined against England. Mistrusting the openness of Tagore's Hindu India, it is both cosmopolitan and a specific subjective location.

This book focuses on modern theatrical adaptations that rework classic plays in new British and Irish settings. It explores these shifted national contexts and examines what they might reveal about the political and cultural climate of the new setting. In examining the modern setting alongside the country of the original text, it also reveals fascinating resonances between two different national contexts. The book discusses five British and Irish playwrights and their current adaptations, examining well-known dramatists such as Martin McDonagh, Sarah Kane and Brian Friel, while analysing some of their less well-known plays, offering a novel examination of the adaptation process. The book further provides an insightful commentary on some significant events of the twentieth century in Britain and Ireland, such as the historic Labour victory of 1945 and scandals in the Royal Family since the 1990s. This book will appeal to theatre and performance enthusiasts, as well as students and scholars of both theatre and adaptation.

Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text looks at the widespread tradition of using a female figure to represent the nation, focusing on twentieth-century Scottish literature. The woman-as-nation figure emerged in Scotland in the twentieth century, but as a literary figure rather than an institutional icon like Britannia or France's Marianne. Scottish writers make use of familiar aspects of the trope such as the protective mother nation and the woman as fertile land, which are obviously problematic from a feminist perspective. But darker implications, buried in the long history of the figure, rise to the surface in Scotland, such as woman/nation as victim, and woman/nation as deformed or monstrous. As a result of Scotland's unusual status as a nation within the larger entity of Great Britain, the literary figures under consideration here are never simply incarnations of a confident and complete nation nurturing her warrior sons. Rather, they reflect a more modern anxiety about the concept of the nation, and embody a troubled and divided national identity. Kirsten Stirling traces the development of the twentieth-century Scotland-as-woman figure through readings of poetry and fiction by male and female writers including Hugh MacDiarmid, Naomi Mitchison, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Willa Muir, Alasdair Gray, A.L. Kennedy, Ellen Galford and Janice Galloway.

Presents the results of the 1998 NAEP reading assessment for the nation and for paritcipating states or jurisdications. Results in 1998 are compared to those in 1994 and 1992.