This book reads tragedy as a genre in which the protagonist is estranged from the world around him, and, displaced in time, space, and language, comes to inhabit a milieu which is no longer shared by other characters. This alienation from others also entails a decomposition of the integrity of the individual, which is often seen in tragedy's uncertainty about the protagonists' autonomy: do they act, or do the gods act through them? Where are the boundaries of the self, and the boundaries of the human? After an introductory essay exploring the theatrical and linguistic means by which the protagonist is made to inhabit a strange and singular world, the book devotes essays to plays from classical, renaissance, and neo-classical literature by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Racine. Close attention is paid to the linguistic strangeness of the texts which is often smoothed over by editors and translators, as it is through the weirdness of tragic language that the deep estrangement of the characters is shown. Accordingly, the Greek, Latin, and French texts are quoted in the originals, with translations added, and attention is paid to textual cruces which illustrate the linguistic and conceptual difficulties of these plays.

To Nathan Hunt, honesty is anything but the best policy. Telling the truth has earned him nothing but heartache and pain, so lying about who he is and what he wants seems to be the only path to job security and friends. Hell, it even brings him a hollow kind of happiness. Except that's not much of a life for anyone. Desperate to cure his self-made misery, Nathan agrees to go along with a con that will score enough cash for Nathan to start over. There's just one problem: lying is getting harder by the day. And a con who can't lie, is a con who gets caught. Nathan's attempts to distract himself from his moral quandary lead him to a mysterious, intoxicating man named Fury, a mixed martial arts fighter who knows a thing or two about lies and pasts better left dead and buried. Together, they undertake a journey that proves honesty is more dangerous and more difficult than either of them could have imagined. And as they combat addiction, thugs, guns, and inner demons, Nathan and Fury can only hope that their battle to be together is worth the bitter fight.

In Echoes, John Sallis mobilizes the figure of echo, used by Heidegger to characterize originary thinking, as the motif around which to organize a radical reading of Heidegger's most important texts.

The years between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 are sometimes described as 'The Long Peace', the there were in fact British Soldiers fighting somewhere in the world throughout the whole of that period, usually in an effort to restore order in some far-flung parts of the Empire 'upon which the sun never set.' Although these campaigns have been well documented by numerous historians, Robbert Giddings, well known as author, journalist and writer for radio and television, here adopts an entirely new approach and relies largely on first-hand accounts to show not mealy what happened but what it was actually like to be there. His sources are many and varied and not confined the the soldier's own records. Nothing, for instance, could surpass in vividness Florentia Sale's brilliant account of the terrible retreat from Kabulin 1842. Due respect is also paid to the courage of the opposition. As Lieutenant Charles Townshend wrote after Omdurman in 1898, 'The Valour of these poor half-starved Dervishes...would be graced by Thermopylae.' The book continues eye-witness accounts from the following campaigns and minor wars: Maratha, Gurkha, Burmese, Ashanti, opium, Afghan, Maori, Sikh, Kaffir, Persian, Abyssinian, Zulu, Boer, Egyptian, Sudanese and Matabele. The list alone shows how busy the British Soldier was throughout the nineteenth century. The text itself brilliantly recapture the nature of soldiering in that era.

Relentless young witch, Hazel must choose between following in her mother's footsteps or following her heart. In a land being torn apart by darkness and ancient beasts, will Hazel have the strength to battle against the Gods and create her own path saving the ones that she loves? Will she forge a new path to discover the strength of the gifts she possesses? Or will she bow down to the traditions of time that have molded the only life she has ever known? And will the love she is bonded and mated to, lead her astray from her destined path, or strengthen her Goddess given talents?

The Daughter’s Way investigates negotiations of female subjectivity in twentieth-century Canadian women’s elegies with a special emphasis on the father’s death as a literary and political watershed. The book examines the work of Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Kristjana Gunnars, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Anne Carson, and Erin Mouré as elegiac daughteronomies—literary artifacts of mourning that grow from the poets’ investigation into the function and limitations of elegiac convention. Some poets treat the father as a metaphor for socio-political power, while others explore more personal iterations of loss, but all the poets in The Daughter’s Way seek to redefine daughterly duty in a contemporary context by challenging elegiac tradition through questions of genre and gender. Beginning with psychoanalytical theories of filiation, inheritance, and mourning as they are complicated by feminist challenges to theories of kinship and citizenship, The Daughter’s Way debates the efficacy of the literary “work of mourning” in twentieth-century Canadian poetry. By investigating the way a daughter’s filial piety performs and sometimes reconfigures such work, and situating melancholia as a creative force in women’s elegies, the book considers how elegies inquire into the rhetoric of mourning as it is complicated by father-daughter kinship.

Comic Books and American Cultural History is an anthology that examines the ways in which comic books can be used to understand the history of the United States. Over the last twenty years, there has been a proliferation of book-length works focusing on the history of comic books, but few have investigated how comics can be used as sources for doing American cultural history. These original essays illustrate ways in which comic books can be used as resources for scholars and teachers. Part 1 of the book examines comics and graphic novels that demonstrate the techniques of cultural history; the essays in Part 2 use comics and graphic novels as cultural artifacts; the third part of the book studies the concept of historical identity through the 20th century; and the final section focuses on different treatments of contemporary American history. Discussing topics that range from romance comics and Superman to American Flagg! and Ex Machina, this is a vivid collection that will be useful to anyone studying comic books or teaching American history.

Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell were must-see TV long before that phrase became ubiquitous. Individually interesting, together they were mesmerizing. They were profoundly different -- young and old, black and white, a Muslim and a Jew, Ali barely literate and Cosell an editor of his university's law review. Yet they had in common forces that made them unforgettable: Both were, above all, performers who covered up their deep personal insecurities by demanding -- loudly and often -- public acclaim. Theirs was an extraordinary alliance that produced drama, comedy, controversy, and a mutual respect that helped shape both men's lives. Dave Kindred -- uniquely equipped to tell the Ali-Cosell story after a decades-long intimate working relationship with both men -- re-creates their unlikely connection in ways never before attempted. From their first meeting in 1962 through Ali's controversial conversion to Islam and refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army (the right for him to do both was publicly defended by Cosell), Kindred explores both the heroics that created the men's upward trajectories and the demons that brought them to sadness in their later lives. Kindred draws on his experiences with Ali and Cosell, fresh reporting, and interviews with scores of key personalities -- including the families of both. In the process, Kindred breaks new ground in our understanding of these two unique men. The book presents Ali not as a mythological character but as a man in whole, and it shows Cosell not in caricature but in faithful scale. With vivid scenes, poignant dialogue, and new interpretations of historical events, this is a biography that is novelistically engrossing -- a richly evocative portrait of the friendship that shaped two giants and changed sports and television forever.