The Unsociable Sociability Of Women S Lifewriting

By investigating women lifewriters' complex quest to distinguish themselves both within and from institutions and communities, this volume uses Kant's concept of unsociable sociability to formulate a divided sense of self at the heart of women's lifewriting, offering a provocative response to the notion of the relational female subject.

Animal death is a complex, uncomfortable, depressing, motivating and sensitive topic.

This book is concerned with our ideological, technical and emotional investments in reclaiming medieval for contemporary popular culture. The authors illuminate both medieval and contemporary popular culture in surprising and productive ways while interrogating the many ways in which metamedievalism reinterprets and reconceptualises the medieval.

Recognising the great legacy of women's life writings, this book draws on a wealth of sources to critically examine the impact of these writings on our communities.

This collection of essays offers a stimulating insight into the practice of reading and the relationship between reading and writing in women’s life writing texts such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, travel logs, and graphic memoirs. It covers a great variety of writers from literary classics such as Virginia Woolf to the authors of slave narratives. Some essays focus on how literary texts help frame a narrative of the self, acting as models and counter models; others insist on the role of literature in resisting imposed gendered and ethnic identities. The essays also show that female writers use reading to deepen their relationship to the rest of the world. While reading is often represented as central to life and aesthetic experience, the collection stresses that there is no single or universal approach to reading in women’s life writing. Taking into account debates about life writing, the collection opens new fields of investigation and fully participates in current scholarly conversations in the field.

This volume is the first book-length collection on Japanese literary and popular cultural responses to the coronavirus pandemic in English. Disrupting the narrative of COVID-19 as a catastrophe without precedent, this book contextualizes the COVID-19 global public health crisis and pandemic-induced social and political turbulence in a post-industrial society that has withstood multiple major destructions and disasters. From published fiction by major authors to anonymous accounts on social media, from network TV shows to contents by Virtual YouTubers (VTubers), in both "high" and "low" culturescapes, timely representations of coronavirus and individual and social livings under its impact emerge. These narratives, either personal or top-down, all endeavor to fathom this unexpected disruption of modern linear progress. Exploring the paradoxes underlying the "new normal" of Japanese society of the present day, the book collectively demonstrates how the narratives of coronavirus are not "neo-" but "re-": returning to the past, revealing existing problems and reclaiming memories lost and lessons forgotten. This edited volume will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Japanese culture and society, Japanese literature, and pandemic studies.

How does one describe the Pacific's pasts? The easy confidence historians once had in writing about the region has disappeared in the turmoil surrounding today's politics of representation. Earlier narratives that focused on what happened when are now accused of encouraging myths of progress. Remembrance of Pacific Pasts takes a different course. It acknowledges history's multiplicity and selectivity, its inability to represent the past in its entirety "as it really was" and instead offers points of reference for thinking with and about the region's pasts. It encourages readers to participate in the historical process by constructing alternative histories that draw on the volume's chapters. The book's thirty-four contributions, written by a range of authors spanning a variety of styles and disciplines, are organized into four sections. The first presents frames of reference for analyzing the problems, poetics, and politics involved in addressing the region's pasts today. The second considers early Islander-Western contact focusing on how each side sought to physically and symbolically control the other. The third deals with the colonial dynamics of the region: the "tensions of empire" that permeated imperial rule in the Pacific. The fourth explores the region's postcolonial politics through a discussion of the varied ways independence and dependence overlap today. Remembrance of Pacific Pasts includes many of the region's most distinguished authors such as Albert Wendt, Greg Dening, Epeli Hau'ofa, Marshall Sahlins, Patricia Grace, and Nicholas Thomas. In addition, it features chapters by well-known writers from outside Pacific Studies -- Edward Said, James Clifford, Richard White,and Gyan Prakash -- which help place the region's dynamics in comparative perspective. By moving Pacific history beyond traditional, empirical narratives to new ways for conversing about history, by drawing on current debates surrounding the politics of representation to offer different ways for thinking about the region's pasts, this work has relevance for students and scholars of history, anthropology, and cultural studies both within and beyond the region.