The first comprehensive review of all extant "Italian" chronicles set in the Philippine Islands, this book juxtaposes "Filipino" Otherness with the unique condition of "Italian" ambivalence and alterity within Europe. This book's contribution to the critical studies of travel is the opening of an analytical middle ground, highlighting the ambivalence of Italian chroniclers while acknowledging their participation in epistemological practices subsumed within the broader enterprise of conquest. Beyond the role of travel writing in colonial episteme, the book also situates the act of writing about one’s travels in instances of national character building (in Italy’s case) and in attempts of constructing a national historiography (in the Philippines' case). This manner of nuancing literary productions by the West while navigating its implications in the East, specifically, how pre-Unification “Italian” travel informed nationalist constructions in the Revolutionary Philippines, could enrich our understanding of and refract monolithic conceptions of metropole−periphery relations.

This volume traces the growth of Tennessee Williams from being a fragile child to becoming one of America’s greatest playwrights, also highlighting the playwright’s deep indebtedness to the Southern literary conventions. The book analyses Williams’s wonderful play with the sense of time and shows how in The Glass Menagerie as in all memory plays, the protagonist ruminates over the past, re-evaluates himself in that context and has a deeper understanding of the present, eventually using memory to recover from past trauma. One of the chapters analyses the use of the new form in Menagerie that Williams and his contemporaries had begun experimenting with, what Williams referred to as ‘plastic theatre’. Twentieth century American poetic drama, turned out to be contemporary, seeking the universal emotional and psychic truths and simultaneously portraying American life and culture with authenticity. The book also involves an in-depth study of the characters in Menagerie. Tom Wingfield has been critiqued in relationship to the absent father, the formidable mother and the soulmate sister; and the author has focused on, amongst many things, the gender issue. She has provided an analysis and critique of the reproduction of sex and gender and has brought the reader’s attention to Tom Wingfield’s and the playwright’s own struggle to strike a balance between the masculine and the feminine.

In this study, the engaging art created by children’s author Margaret Wise Brown receives the critical attention it deserves as a lasting contribution to American children’s literature. Through analysis of her dozens of titles published during the height of western Modernism, this scholarly text shares Brown’s importance and impact from the perspective of Brown’s work, rather than biographically. Moving beyond such popular titles as Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny into deeper cuts reveals how Brown’s oeuvre bridges multiple disciplines, including writing, visual art, philosophy, and music. Her projects successfully experiment with artistic collaboration and synesthesia as a natural expression for a child readership while both contributing to and reflecting high Modernism amidst the two World Wars. The quality of Brown’s writing and the maturity of her themes reveal respect for her child audience and recommend her work to the generations of readers who followed her early death. As this book demonstrates, Margaret Wise Brown remains one of the truly great authors of children’s literature.

Feelings of rootlessness, fragmentation and loneliness are endemic in today’s secular societies. In the late nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim described this kind of social malaise as anomie, a concept which this book locates within a historical narrative of the emergence of Modernism from Modernity. The book focuses on two representative figures, Benedictus de Spinoza and Vincent van Gogh, on whose work it offers some significant new perspectives. Spinoza drew up a blueprint for Modernity, which is to say, the cultural transformations that took place as a result of the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation. In counterpoint to his overriding confidence in reason, a persistent current in Spinoza’s writing shows how concerned he was about a possible loss of confidence in his governing idea of a single Substance, the philosophical God with which he sought to replace the creator God of the Bible. In promoting art as a means of filling the gap left by the absence of Spinoza’s philosophical God and the failures of traditional Christianity, Van Gogh also discovered the limitations of the vocation to which he had dedicated himself. He concluded that, in the tension between art and anomie, a new kind of religious sensibility and understanding might emerge. This remains the case in the current postmodern cultural phase when fragmentation and incoherence are summoning up new assessments and re-configurations of values promoting new forms of solidarity, dialogue and religious understanding.

This book explores J. R. R. Tolkien’s unique and warm relationship to the Kalevala, a poem usually hailed as the Finnish and Karelian national epic, compiled, edited and partly revisioned from older folk poetry by Finnish scholar Elias Lönnrot in the 19th century. J. R. R. Tolkien, an Oxford academic and the greatest author of the 20th-century fantasy, creator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was fascinated from early on by the Kalevala. Tolkien himself described the Kalevala as “a germ” of his fantasy fiction.

"The first comprehensive review of all extant 'Italian' chronicles set in the Philippine Islands, this book juxtaposes 'Filipino' Otherness with the unique condition of 'Italian' ambivalence and alterity within Europe. This book's contribution to the critical studies of travel is the opening of an analytical middle ground, highlighting the ambivalence of Italian chroniclers while acknowledging their participation in epistemological practices subsumed within the broader enterprise of conquest. Beyond the role of travel writing in colonial episteme, the book also situates the act of writing about one's travels in instances of national character building (in Italy's case) and in attempts of constructing a national historiography (in the Philippine case). This manner of nuancing literary productions by the West while navigating its implications in the East, specifically, how pre-Unification "Italian" travel informed nationalist constructions in the Revolutionary Philippines, could enrich our understanding of and refract monolithic conceptions of metropole-periphery relations"--

This first full-length study in English on seventeenth-century Italian travel writing enriches our understanding of an unusually fertile period for Italian contributions to the genre. The intrinsic qualities of this literature can now be grasped in terms of the larger question of cultural identity in Italy. For Hester, the specifically literary characteristics of Italian travel writing”including its humanism or Petrarchism”highlight the classic eminence throughout Europe of a prestigious tradition inherent to Italy, one compensating then for the peninsula's lack of a national political identity. Appeals to the cultural authority of that tradition represent a means of addressing and overcoming anxieties about the Italian subject's diasporic status during the "Golden Age" of European global colonial expansion. Self-funded travelers Francesco Carletti, Pietro Della Valle, Francesco Belli, Francesco Negri, and Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri are the major authors studied who journeyed through Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and America.

This book provides a fresh account of modernist writing in a perspective based on the reading strategies developed by postcolonial studies.

This book studies a selection of works of Philippine literature written in Spanish during the American occupation of the Philippines (1902-1946). It explores the place of Filipino nationalism in a selection of fiction and non-fiction texts by Spanish-speaking Filipino writers Jesús Balmori, Adelina Gurrea Monasterio, Paz Mendoza Guazón, and Antonio Abad. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws from Anthropology, History, Literary Studies, Cultural Analysis and World Literature, this book offers a comparative analysis of the position of these authors toward the cultural transformations that have taken place as a result of the Philippines' triple history of colonization (by Spain, the US, and Japan) while imagining an independent nation. Engaging with an untapped archive, this book is a relevant and timely contribution to the fields of both Filipino and Hispanic literary studies.

In today’s Europe, migrant domestic workers are indispensable in supporting many households which, without their employment, would lack sufficient domestic and care labour. Black Girls collects and explores the stories of some of the first among these workers. They are the Afro-Surinamese and the Eritrean women who in the 1960s and 70s migrated to the former colonising country, the Netherlands and Italy respectively, and there became domestic and care workers. Sabrina Marchetti analyses the narratives of some of these women in order to powerfully demonstrate how the legacies of the colonial past have been, at the same time, both their tool of resistance and the reason for their subordination.