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Spoken word is one of the most popular styles of poetry in North America. While its prevalence is often attributed to the form's strong ties to oral culture, Recalling Recitation in the Americas reveals how poetry memorization and recitation curricula, shaped by British Imperial policy, influenced contemporary performance practices. During the early twentieth century, educators frequently used the recitation of canonical poems to instill "proper" speech and behaviour in classrooms in Canada,...

This volume of essays and translations analyzes the prodigious and wide-ranging output of Suga Keijirō. Based in Japan, Suga Keijirō’s (b. 1958-) works are wide-ranging and multilingual. His volumes of poetry have been shortlisted for a range of poetry prizes, and he was awarded the 2011 Yomiuri Shinbun Prize for Travel writing. He has translated dozens of books and has authored or co-authored more than fifteen other books across various genres. He is, by his own introduction, a poet first, but...

In Shakespeare and Science Fiction Sarah Annes Brown investigates why so many science fiction writers have turned to Shakespeare when imagining humanity's future. He and his works become a kind of touchstone for the species in much science fiction, both transcending and exemplifying what it means to be human. Writers have used Shakespeare in a range of often contradictory ways. He is associated with freedom and with tyranny, with optimistic visions of space exploration and with the complete dest...

Through readings of Ishiguro’s repurposing of key elements of realism and modernism; his interest in childhood imagination and sketching; interrogation of aesthetics and ethics; his fascination with architecture and the absent home; and his expressionist use of ‘imaginary’ space and place, Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics examines the manner in which Ishiguro's fictions approach, but never quite reveal, the ineffable, inexpressible essence of his narrators’ emotionally fraught worlds. Reformu...

Shortlisted for the 2021 BSLS Book Prize This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the Wellcome Trust. Genomic technologies have had a profound impact on understandings of what it means to be human and our links to the world we inhabit, and on practices of inhabiting the world. This book considers this impact across a range of literary forms, cultural practices, and political imaginari...

Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis considers the phenomenon of the continued relevance of collage, a form established over a hundred years ago, to contemporary literature. It argues that collage is a perfect artistic vehicle to represent the crisis-ridden reality of the twenty-first-century. Being a mixture of fragmentary incompatible voices, collage embodies the chaos of the media-dominated world. Examining the artistic, sociopolitical and personal crises addre...

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of se...

Transnational in scope, this much-needed volume explores how modernist writers and artists address and critique dramatic changes to food systems that took place in the early twentieth century. In this period, small farms were being replaced with industrial agriculture, political upheavals exacerbated food scarcity in many countries, and globalization opened up new modes of distributing culinary commodities. Looking at a unique variety of texts by authors from Ireland, Italy, France, the United...

Adaptation in Young Adult Novels argues that adapting classic and canonical literature and historical places engages young adult readers with their cultural past and encourages them to see how that past can be rewritten. The textual afterlives of classic texts raise questions for new readers: What can be changed? What benefits from change? How can you, too, be agents of change? The contributors to this volume draw on a wide range of contemporary novels - from Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series...

Oil, like other fossil fuels, permeates every aspect of human existence. Yet it has been largely ignored by cultural critics, especially in the context of the Global South. Seeking to make visible not only the pervasiveness of oil in society and culture but also its power, Oil Fictions stages a critical intervention that aligns with the broader goals of the energy humanities. Exploring literature and film about petroleum as a genre of world literature, Oil Fictions focuses on the ubiquity of oi...

A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears-immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union-but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degen...