This collection ranges far and wide, as befits the personality and accomplishments of the dedicatee, Geoffrey V. Davis, German studies and exile literature scholar, postcolonialist (if there are ‘specialties’, then Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, Black Britain), journal and book series editor.... The volume opens with essays on cultural theory and practice, proceeds to close analyses of ‘settler colony’ texts from Canada, India, Australia, and New Zealand (drama, fiction, and poetry) as well as Pacific drama and Canadian indigeneity, thence ‘homeward’ to the UK (black drama, Scottish fiction, the music of Morrissey) and to German themes (exile literature; fictions about Hitler). Because Geoff’s commitment to literature has always been ‘hands-on’, the book closes with a selection of poems and experimental prose. Writers discussed include Carmen Aguirre, Hany Abu-Assad, Beryl Bainbridge, Albert Belz, Peter Bland, Peter Carey, Lynda Chanwai–Earle, Kamala Das, Robert Drewe, Éric Emmanuel–Schmitt, Toa Fraser, Stephen Fry, Dianna Fuemana, Mavis Gallant, Alasdair Gray, Xavier Her¬bert, Janette Turner Hospital, Elizabeth Jolley, Wendy Lill, Varanasi Nagalakshmi, Arundhati Roy, Daniel Sloate, Drew Hayden Taylor, Jane Urquhart, Roy Williams, and Arnold Zweig.

The long-awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies worldwide, The Committed follows the man of two minds as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail. Both highly suspenseful and existential, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.

Ethics for Apocalyptic Times is about the role literature can play in helping readers cope with our present-day crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and the shift toward fascism in global politics. Using the lens of Mennonite literature and their own personal experience as a culturally Mennonite, queer, Latinx person, Daniel Shank Cruz investigates the age-old question of what literature’s role in society should be, and argues that when we read literature theapoetically, we can glean a relational ethic that teaches us how to act in our difficult times. In this book, Cruz theorizes theapoetics—a feminist reading strategy that reveals the Divine via literature based on lived experiences—and extends the concept to show how it is queer, decolonial, and equally applicable to secular and religious discourse. Cruz’s analysis focuses on Mennonite literature—including Sofia Samatar’s short story collection Tender and Miriam Toew’s novel Women Talking—but also examines a non-Mennonite text, Samuel R. Delany’s novel The Mad Man, alongside practices of haiku and tarot, to show how reading theapoetically is transferable to other literary traditions. Weaving together close reading and personal narrative, this pathbreaking book makes a significant and original contribution to the field of Mennonite literary studies. Cruz’s arguments will also be appreciated by literary scholars interested in queer theory and the role of literature in society.

This book foregrounds the figure of the perpetrator in a selection of British, American, and Canadian comics and explores questions related to remembrance, justice, and historical debt. Its primary focus is on works that deliberately estrange the figure of the perpetrator—through fantasy, absurdism, formal ambiguity, or provocative rewriting—and thus allow readers to engage anew with the history of genocide, mass murder, and sexual violence. This book is particularly interested in the ethical space such an engagement calls into being: in its ability to allow us to ponder the privilege many of us now enjoy, the gross historical injustices that have secured it, and the debt we owe to people long dead.

This collection addresses broad questions of ethics and aesthetics in the framework of vernacular cosmopolitanism. With a common anthropological focus, the essays map literary and artistic practices involving cross-cultural transactions shaped by social forces, institutions, and the multiple mediations of the imagination. Some essays are based on community-based fieldwork, while all encompass an affective immersion in the places we inhabit, and the claims these make on the body’s intelligibility. The authors consider the role of artists, writers, and literary scholars as cultural actors in a variety of settings, grassroots, regional, trans-regional, and global. Topics include: the role of social and cultural activism; the problematic dimensions of national belonging; the plurality of knowledge-systems and inter-language environ-mental learning in South Africa; the vernacular imagination in Papua New Guinea Anglophone fiction; pulp fiction and chick lit in India; transformative artistic motifs of Australia’s nomadic Tiwi community; life writing as a reconfiguring of postcolonial or cosmopolitan paradigms; southern African supernatural belief-systems and the malign magic of the global economy; Canadian First Nations literature read against the struggle for self-determination by India’s castes and scheduled tribes; feral animals in relation to the indigenous exotic; and the imbrication of the vernacular, national, colonial, and cosmopolitan in perceptions of homecoming in the eastern Mediterranean. The collection as a whole thus provides manifestations of poesis in relation to theory and praxis and articulates perspectives that expand, challenge, strengthen, and renew the potential for growth in contemporary world literature and culture.

There are many 'Shakespeares', argue the contributors to this, the second volume of Alternative Shakespeares and the different versions emerge in a wide variety of cultural contexts: race, gender, sexuality and politics amongst others. Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 consists of entirely new essays by some of the world's leading Shakespearean critics. The topics covered include: Sexuality and Gender, Language and Power, Textualilty and Printing, Race and Shakespeare's Britain, New Historicist Criticism and the 'Gaze' of the Audience. In abandoning the search for any final and definitive 'meaning' in any of Shakepeare's plays, the contributors to Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 present an exciting and ultimately liberating challeneg to Shakespeare studies.

Offering an authoritative account of the relationship between literature and medicine between approximately 1800 and 1900, this volume brings together leading scholars in the field to provide a valuable overview of how two dynamic fields influenced and shaped each during a period of revolutionary change. During the nineteenth century, medicine was being redefined as a subject in which experimental methodologies could transform the healing art, and was simultaneously branching off into new specialisms and subdivisions. Questions addressed in this volume include the influence of physics on poetry, the role of medical professionalism in fiction, the cultural and literary representation of sanitation, and the interdisciplinary nature of controversy and negligence. Along with its sister publication, Literature and Medicine in the Eighteenth Century, this volume offers a major critical overview of the study of literature and medicine.

From a Biblical perspective, followership is an important aspect of leadership and is exemplified in the lives of numerous individuals in the Bible. These examples offer valuable guidance for how followership can be applied in modern organizations. Divided into three parts, this volume presents biblical models of followership and case studies of biblical leaders and followers, examines followership within organizational contexts, and delves into the impact of gender, race, emotional intelligence, and cultural intelligence on effective followership. Overall, this work contributes to the emerging field of followership in organizational leadership research, with a particular emphasis on the Biblical perspective but also relevant to broader leadership studies.

Attitudes are evaluations of people, places, things, and ideas. They help us to navigate through a complex world. They provide guidance for decisions about which products to buy, how to travel to work, or where to go on vacation. They color our perceptions of others. Carefully crafted interventions can change attitudes and behavior. Yet attitudes, beliefs, and behavior are often formed and changed in casual social exchanges. The mere perception that other people—say, rich people— favor something may be sufficient to make another person favor it. People’s own actions also influence their attitudes, such that they adjust to be more supportive of the actions. People’s belief systems even change to align with and support their preferences, which at its extreme is a form of denial for which people lack awareness. These two volumes of The Handbook of Attitudes provide authoritative, critical surveys of theory and research about attitudes, beliefs, persuasion, and behavior from key authors in these areas. This second volume covers applications to measurement, behavior prediction, and interventions in the areas of cancer, HIV, substance use, diet, and exercise, as well as in politics, intergroup relations, aggression, migrations, advertising, accounting, education, and the environment.