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Among the multiple, subliminal passions that inspire our life in innumerable ways, literature shows us one that seems to play a particularly penetrating role in human concerns. This passion, which Tymieniecka calls an `esoteric passion', finds its projection and crystallization in space: it is the esoteric passion for space. This subliminal passion, investigated through literature, allows the philosopher to reach beneath the fallacious separations of nature, humanness and the cultural...

Shortlisted, 2020 ASAP Book Prize How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how i...

This book primarily investigates whether the most important work in the development of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu was Contre Sainte-Beuve, often assigned this role, or the first, unfinished and, in Proust's lifetime, unpublished novel, Jean Santeuil. Given the length of the final work, this book focuses on the beginning of the first volume, Du Cote de chez Swann, known as "Combray". Proust was writing his work on the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve, when it appeared to evo...

Early modern works of advice can be typified by a number of texts by Erasmus falling into a variety of categories: advice on family conduct; manners; study plans and piety. A close relation to these works of advice was the parental advice book, usually written by a father to his son. It was not until the early 17th century that the mother's advice book evolved and even then these were often legitimated by the female authors claiming that sickness, or even impending death, made relaying their mot...

Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing is the first book to bring rigorous literary, philosophical, and artistic discourse together to interrogate the ethics of governance and development in postcolonial Africa. It takes literature seriously as a context for philosophical reflection, vividly engaging the human agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of local Nigerians as political and social actors and shedding new light on the dynamics of human flourishing. Drawing on im...

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From providential apocalypticism to climate change, this ground-breaking ecocritical study traces the performance history of the storm scene in King Lear to explore our shifting, fraught and deeply ideological relationship with stormy weather across time. This Contentious Storm offers a new ecocritical reading of Shakespeare's classic play, illustrating how th...

Richard Wright and Transnationalism sees Dr. Mamoun Alzoubi argue that renowned American Author, Richard Wright, transformed the way that we approach comparative literature by beginning to look at matters of American racism and Civil Rights in transnational contexts, formed by the new nations surfacing from colonial rule. Richard Wright and Transnationalism demonstrates how Wright, beginning with his work in the 1950s, began to hypothesize the shared history of suffering that linked the experien...

When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Daubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had...

This is the first book in English on Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay 1878-Argentina 1937), a canonical author whose works are read by all advanced students of Spanish in the US and many other countries. The study examines Quiroga's work through the theoretical lens of the heroic-a lens elaborated in part by means of Quiroga's own disquisitions on the subject-and the complementary phenomenon of the monstrous. This lens serves to elucidate many evidently obscure and self-contradictory aspects of Quiroga'...