Böcker utgivna av Cambria Press

From advertisements to amusement parks, themed restaurants, and Renaissance fairs twenty-first century popular culture is strewn with reimaginings of the Middle Ages. They are nowhere more prevalent, however, than in the films, television series, books, and video games of speculative genres: fantasy and science fiction. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies and George R. R. Martin's multimedia Game of Thrones franchise are just two of the most widely known and successful fantasy conglomerates of recent decades. Medievalism has often been understood as a defining feature of fantasy, and as the antithesis of science fiction, but such constructs vastly underestimate the complexities of both genres and their interactions. "Medieval" has multiple meanings in fantasy and science fiction, which shift with genre convention, and which bring about their own changes as authors and audiences engage with what has gone before in the recent and deeper pasts. Earlier volumes have examined some of the ways in which contemporary popular culture re-imagines the Middle Ages, offering broad overviews, but none considers fantasy, science fiction, or the two together. The focused approach of this collection provides a directed pathway into the myriad medievalisms of modern popular culture. By engaging directly with genre(s), this book acknowledges that medievalist creative texts and practices do not occur in a vacuum, but are shaped by multiple cultural forces and concerns; medievalism is never just about the Middle Ages.

When nineteen-year-old Matthew Lewis crafted The Monk in 1796, he had no idea what hideous progeny he had created. The text plagued Lewis throughout his life to the point where he earned the nickname "Monk" Lewis, symbolic of criticism he and the text received equating Lewis directly with the ideas in his infamous gothic novel. The Monk rose to the pinnacle of popularity in an England consumed by its love for Gothic romances and enswathed in the language of political, social, and religious turmoil. In addition, Lewis's novel has endured centuries of criticism to become part of the twenty-first century's love affair with the Gothic. Elements in Lewis's novel have spoken to humankind across the ages, primarily through his principle character, the fallen monk, Ambrosio. Why do The Monk and Ambrosio enwrap imaginations in the dichotomy between appeal and repulsion? What does Ambrosio experience in his mental and physical Lifeworlds as he catapults himself into damnation in the text, and what can humankind appropriate from his fall?This book takes a new approach to literary studies of The Monk by turning hermeneutic phenomenology in a new direction - into the minds of the characters themselves. The reader enters the mind of Ambrosio and experience the world and the symbols surrounding him, including his intersubjective constitution with other characters, as he experiences them. While applying phenomenology to a fictive text is not new, focusing hermeneutic phenomenology exclusively on the consciousness of the characters in a literary text is. The author takes this bold step thoughtfully and analytically, explaining step by step how Ambrosio takes himself down a path to damnation in his own consciousness before Satan ever throws him off of a mountain, in effect explaining how salvation for Ambrosio is impossible by the end of the novel. While previous approaches have analyzed the reader's experience through the lens of phenomenology, this work examines a character's experience through the lens of hermeneutic-phenomenology, analyzing symbols present in the monk's consciousness and how they affect his mental path to damnation, as opposed to analyzing the reader's experience through that same lens. By moving a layer deeper than traditional approaches, this work opens new realms of possibility in literary criticism.

The garments and textiles sector is one of the oldest export industries and has often served as the starter industry for many countries, especially in Asia. To quell the fear of job losses to countries in the global South, northern countries established the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA) in 1974. This arrangement restricted garment and textile imports to the United States, Canada, and the European Union (EU) by allocating quotas to countries throughout the developing world. The MFA, in place after more than thirty years, was finally phased out in 2005. Most studies conducted prior to the 2005 quota phase out predicted that once the quotas were lifted, many of the smaller countries would drastically lose market share. The prime reason for this pessimism was the notion that the various stakeholders would never be able to work together to make the necessary changes needed for the sector. The subtext was that these groups would be too focused on their own interests and would not want to compromise their intimate relationship with powerful players in the industry. In contrast to the conventional wisdom of that time, many of the unexpected countries like Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka not only survived the end of the MFA, but they have made significant improvements which have allowed them to maintain their foothold in the international trading regime. The general perception of the garment and textile industry in the global South is fueled only by images of dismal labor conditions and unsuitable factories, descriptions of labor clashes with police, and analyses of low wages and exploitative multinational corporations. This book presents an insightful perspective on the garment and textiles industries in Asia by highlighting that an industry fraught with competing concerns can, in fact, collaborate and work together when it is in the interest of both the state and interest groups to do so. This comparative study recognizes the role of both the state and interest groups in the policy making process and argues that they are interlinked and require one another for sustainable reforms. Employing original, in-depth research in three different countries, the study skillfully delves down deep beyond the macro statistics and commonly held images to cast light on some of the significant policy and attitudinal shifts that have occurred in this industry. It demonstrates that even though the struggle continues, it is important to recognize the improvements thus far and to work towards positive change. This book also takes a much larger historical view of the sector, arguing that manipulation of the trading regime has created and continues to create both incentives and disincentives for the various stakeholders involved in this industry. By analyzing the garment sector through the lens of domestic coalitions, Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka: The Labor Behind the Global Garments and Textiles Industries presents new and innovative ways of conceptualizing the garment and textiles industries that include the possibility for change and resistance from a vantage point of cooperation among key groups, rather than only contention. The book utilizes the established policy networks framework, which has traditionally only been applied to the United States and European nations, but expertly adapts it to countries in the global South. Saxena s domestic coalitions approach, which can be thought of as a precursor to a full policy network, differs from the policy network approach in crucial ways by highlighting the importance of other actors or facilitators in the network, recognizing that interactions among stakeholders are just as important as interactions between groups and the state, as well as the incentives associated with expanding the existing coalition. Saxena has conducted more than a hundred interviews with key informants, several focus groups with eighty-five garment factory workers, as well as quantitative surveys of a hundred garment workers in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka to establish several important insights about this early stage of domestic coalitions in these countries. First, the changing role of labor marked by its entrance into the coalition is itself significant in these countries where the network has been historically shut out to labor groups. Second, the study demonstrates that various types of channels and mechanisms, both institutionalized and non-institutionalized, are essential to ensure the representation of labor groups and their influence on policy change in the industry. Third, the book expertly delinks the concepts of improved labor conditions and worker empowerment, by arguing that one should not assume that better labor conditions automatically translate into an empowered workforce. Finally, Saxena comes to a critical conclusion that change and improvements stemming from top-down programs, though they may be initially effective in improving basic standards, do not help in furthering coalitions with labor groups and institutionalizing their role in policy making. This study puts the entire sector into the larger context of international trade policy; effects of decades of import quotas set the context at the beginning of the book while current trade policies impacting the garment sector, are discussed at the end. Saxena convincingly argues that the sector and the incentives of those who depend on it cannot be understood without this larger context in which the sector has flourished and ultimately survived, and all of these elements combined are essential to understanding the complexities of the garment and textile industries. Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka is essential for students and researchers in policy studies, labor studies, South and Southeast Asian studies, international trade, and political science, as well as those engaged in program design and evaluation of projects focused on labor rights. This study is also critical for non-governmental organizations with a thematic focus on the garments and textiles industry, labor rights, human rights, and international trade policy, as well as for private sector organizations focused on improving labor conditions around the world. Watch Dr. Sanchita Saxena speak about the book!

In this unprecedented, fascinating book which covers women in theatre from the 1910s to the 2010s, author Lynne Greeley notes that, for the purposes of this study, "feminism" is defined as the political impulse toward economic and social empowerment for females or the female-identified, a position perceived by many feminists as oppositional to ideas of femininity that they see as personally and politically constraining and that "femininity" comprises social behaviors and practices that mean as "many different things as there are women," some of which are empowering and others of which are not. This book illuminates how throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, playwrights and artists in American theatre both embodied and disrupted the feminine of their times. Through approaches as wide ranging as performing their own recipes, energizing silences, raging against war and rape, and inviting the public to inscribe their naked bodies, theatre artists have used performance as a site to insert themselves between the physicality of their female presence and the liminality of their disrupting the role of the feminine. Capturing that place of liminality, a neither-here-nor-there place that is often unsafe, where the established order is overturned by acts as banal as raising a plant, women have written and performed and disrupted their way through one hundred years of theatre history, even within the constraints of a variably rigid and usually unsympathetic social order. Creating a feminist femininity, they have reinscribed their place in the culture and provided models for their audiences to do the same. This comprehensive tome, part of the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts headed by John Clum (Duke University) is an essential addition for theater studies and women's studies.

Poets writing in Spanish by the end of the twentieth century had to contend with globalization as a backdrop for their literary production. They could embrace it, ignore it or potentially re-imagine the role of the poet altogether. This book examines some of the efforts of Spanish-language poets to cope with the globalizing cultural economy of the late twentieth century. This study looks at the similarities and differences in both text and context of poets, some major and some minor, writing in Chile, Mexico, the Mexican American community and Spain. These poets write in a variety of styles, from highly experimental approaches to poetry to more traditional methods of writing. Included in this study are Chileans Ra l Zurita and Cecilia Vicu a, Spaniards Leopoldo Mar a Panero and Luis Garc a Montero, Mexicans Silvia Tomasa Rivera and Guillermo G mez Pe a, and Mexican American U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Some of them embrace (and are even embraced by) media both old and new whereas others eschew it. Some continue their work in the vein of national traditions while others become difficult to situate within any one single national tradition. Exploring the varieties of strategies these writers employ, this book makes it clear that Spanish-language poets have not been exempt from the process of globalization. Individually, these poets have been studied to varying degrees. Globalization has been studied extensively from a variety of disciplinary approaches, particularly in the context of the Latin American region and Spain. However, it is a relative rarity to see poets being studied, as they are in this work, in terms of their relationship to globalization. Taken as a sample or snapshot of writing tendencies in Latin American and Spanish poetry of the late twentieth century, this book studies them as part of a greater circuit of cultural production by establishing their literary as well as extra-literary genealogies and connections. It situates these poets in terms of their writing itself as well as in terms of their literary traditions, their methods of contending with neoliberal economic models and global information flows from the television and Internet. Although many literary critics attempt to study the connections and relationships between poetry and the world beyond the page, few monographs go about it the way this one does. It takes a transatlantic approach to contemporary Spanish-language poetry, focusing on poets on poets from Spain and the American continent, emphasizing their connections, commonalities and differences across increasingly porous borders in the age of information. The relationship between text and context is explored with a cultural studies approach, more often associated with media studies than with literary studies. Literature is not treated as a privileged object of isolated study, but rather as a system of ideas and images that is deeply interwoven with other forms of human expression that have arisen in the last decades of the twentieth century. The result is a suggestive analysis of the figure of the poet in the broader globalized marketplace of cultural goods and ideas. Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age is an important book for library collections in Spanish, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Chicano Studies.

This book is in the Cambria Latin American Literatures and Cultures Series headed by Rom n de la Campa, the Edwin B. and Lenore R. Williams Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. This book analyzes the relation between cultural changes and experimental fiction written during the 1920s and 30s. This era, known in Latin America as the historical avant-garde, was characterized by a wave of literary and artistic innovation. By framing several Central American novels and short stories from this period within the highly dynamic political and intellectual cultures from which they emerge, this study analyzes the way in which novelists Miguel ngel Asturias, Luis Cardoza y Arag n, Flavio Herrera, Rogelio Sin n, and Max Jim nez employ subversive narrative strategies that undermine previously dominant intellectual paradigms. This study demonstrates how these writers undermine the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and naturalism through a variety of experimental narrative techniques while simultaneously rejecting the discourse of positivism. This had significant social implications given that positivism the notion that true knowledge could only be obtained through observable scientific data was abused by Latin American military dictators during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a means of oppressing indigenous groups and working-class citizens under the guise of social progress. This book thus argues that the use of experimental narrative strategies in these novels is not merely for the sake of artistic innovation, but, rather, that these literary works manifest a desire for modernization through social and cultural change. The study concludes by pointing to the undeniable influence that these authors have had on the trajectory of contemporary Central American fiction. The Central American works analyzed in this study are significant contributions to the Latin American avant-garde, but have been overlooked for two reasons. First, until recently, the main focus of critics of the Latin American avant-garde has been on poetry and manifestos rather than fiction. Second, there has traditionally been a general lack of attention in Latin American literary criticism to the Central American region as a whole. Central American avant-garde fiction is therefore a field that has been dually marginalized by literary critics who have tended to focus on works of other genres by authors from countries with major metropolitan centers and well-established literary circles. Merlon H. Forster and David K. Jackson, authors of Vanguardism in Latin American Literature, have described research on the Central American avant-garde as sketchy, noting that much more careful work is needed. This book thus responds to a real need within Latin American literary criticism by addressing an area of research that, because of being overlooked, remains only partially understood. By identifying innovative Central American texts and demonstrating the ways in which they participate in the broader Latin American avant-garde movement, this study contributes to a more complete picture of this continental project of cultural renovation. The author challenges scholars to rethink the concept of the avant-garde as solely a group phenomenon, and establishes a direct link between literary experimentation and the cultural contexts of these Central American countries. This study contributes to recent scholarship that has emphasized the importance of this brief period of radical experimentation in the development of subsequent literary movements in Latin America and contributes to the ongoing dialogue in the humanities about the concept of modernity in relation to various forms of cultural representation. Central American Avant-Garde Narrative is an important book for all literature, Spanish, and Latin American studies collections.

The goal of The BRC Academy Journal of Education is to publish new theoretical models and metrics in business education. Theoretical and empirical studies are encouraged especially when they illustrate innovative perspectives in educational paradigms. Hence, the primary focus is superior scholarship by highly qualified scholarly academics. The journal is independently owned and published by the Cambria Institute (www.cambriainstitute.com). The Cambria Institute is a division of Cambria Press, a leading publisher of academic research. Submissions undergo double-blind peer review. Accepted articles are indexed through CrossRef, Google Scholar, and other sources and assigned DOIs. The journal is

The goal of the BRC Journal of Advances in Education is to publish actionable and real-world case studies and teaching methods that work. The journal serves as a bridge for instructional practitioners, practicing academics, and students who wish to collaborate to demonstrate how to advance teaching and learning in business education. The journal is independently owned and published by the Cambria Institute (www.cambriainstitute.com). The Cambria Institute is a division of Cambria Press, a leading publisher of academic research. Submissions undergo double-blind peer review. Accepted articles are indexed through CrossRef, Google Scholar, and other sources and assigned DOIs. The journal is published in hard and electronic formats and distributed through commercial and non-commercial channels.

This book examines the theories and practices of narrative and drama in England between 1650 and 1700, a period that, in bridging the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, has been comparatively neglected, and on which, at the time of writing, there is a dearth of new approaches. Critical consensus over these two genres has failed to account for its main features and evolution throughout the period in at least two ways. First, most approaches omit the manifold contradictions between the practice and the theory of a genre. Writers were generally aware of working within a tradition of representation which they nevertheless often challenged, even while the theory was being drafted (e.g., by John Dryden). The ideal and the real were in unacknowledged conflict. Second, critical readings of these late Stuart texts have fitted them proactively into a neat evolutionary pattern that reached eighteenth-century genres without detours or disjunctions, or else they have oversimplified the wealth of generic conventions deployed in the period, so that to the present-day reader, for instance, Restoration drama consists only of either city comedies or Dryden's tragedies. A cursory survey of the critical history of seventeenth-century drama and fiction confirms these views. Although the 1970s and 1980s brought about a crop of interesting reassessments of the field, fiction continues to be seen as a genre that emerged in the eighteenth century. Most critics still treat earlier manifestations as marginal or as prenovelistic experiments; and in most instances it is even possible to discern a sexist bias to justify this treatment, as these works were written by women, unlike much of the canonical fiction of the eighteenth century. A revision of the critical foundations hitherto held and a re-evaluation of the works of fiction written in the seventeenth century is therefore in order. This study adopts, as a basic and essential methodological tenet, the need to decenter the analysis of Restoration fiction and drama from the traditional canon, too limited and conservative and featuring works that are not always suitable as paradigmatic instances of the literary production of the period. These studies have thus been based on a larger than usual--if not on a full--corpus of works produced within the period, and have sought to ascertain the role played in the development of each of the genres under consideration by works, topics, or even by authors hitherto somewhat outside mainstream literary criticism. This opens the field of English literature further through the framing of new questions or revising of old ones, as well as to beginning a dialogue, yet again, as to the meanings of these literary works and also to their circulation from their inception up to the present time. In addition, the rare attention given to works by women makes this all the more an important book for collections in English literature of the period.

The goal of The BRC Academy Journal of Business is to publish innovative and ground breaking theoretical and empirical advances in all areas of business. The journal strives to push the envelope and provide an inviting ground to advance new knowledge and applications beyond existing theory and practices. Hence, the primary focus is superior scholarship by highly qualified scholarly academics. The journal is independently owned and published by the Cambria Institute (www.cambriainstitute.com). The Cambria Institute is a division of Cambria Press, a leading publisher of academic research. Submissions undergo double-blind peer review. Accepted articles are indexed through CrossRef, Google Scholar, and other sources and assigned DOIs. The journal is published in hard and electronic formats and distributed through commercial and non-commercial channels.

The goal of the BRC Journal of Advances in Business is to publish pragmatic, relevant, and impactful best practices, industry surveys, and perspectives. The journal seeks to act as a bridge between scholarly practitioners, practicing academics, and students by encouraging joint publications on topical and exciting trends in business. The journal also provides a venue for presenting provocative hypotheses and frameworks that offer new perspectives in business thinking and research. The journal is independently owned and published by the Cambria Institute (www.cambriainstitute.com). The Cambria Institute is a division of Cambria Press, a leading publisher of academic research. Submissions undergo double-blind peer review. Accepted articles are indexed through CrossRef, Google Scholar, and other sources and assigned DOIs. The journal is published in hard and electronic formats and distributed through commercial and non-commercial channels.

The Business Research Consortium (BRC) of Western New York was founded in 2006. The BRC hosts an annual conference and publishes the proceedings of this conference. The BRC also hosts a working papers series to encourage collaboration in research across member colleges and schools of business. For more information on the BRC, please visit its website at http://www.businessresearchconsortium.org

The Business Research Consortium (BRC) of Western New York was founded in 2006. The BRC hosts an annual conference and publishes the proceedings of this conference. The BRC also hosts a working papers series to encourage collaboration in research across member colleges and schools of business. For more information on the BRC, please visit its website at http://www.businessresearchconsortium.org

"One of the least understood and often maligned aspects of the Tokugawa Shogunate is the Ooku, or 'Great Interior, ' the institution within the shogun's palace, administered by and for the upper-class shogunal women and their attendants who resided there. Long the object of titillation and a favorite subject for off-the-wall fantasy in historical TV and film dramas, the actual daily life, practices, cultural roles, and ultimate missions of these women have remained largely in the dark, except for occasional explosions of scandal. In crystal-clear prose that is a pleasure to read, this new book, however, presents the Ooku in a whole new down-to-earth, practical light. After many years of perusing unexamined Ooku documents generated by these women and their associates, the authors have provided not only an overview of the fifteen generations of Shoguns whose lives were lived in residence with this institution, but how shoguns interacted differently with it. Much like recent research on imperial convents, they find not a huddled herd of oppressed women, but on the contrary, women highly motivated to the preservation of their own particular cultural institution. Most important, they have been able to identify "the culture of secrecy" within the Ooku itself to be an important mechanism for preserving the highest value, 'loyalty, ' that essential value to their overall self-interested mission dedicated to the survival of the Shogunate itself." - Barbara Ruch, Columbia University "The aura of power and prestige of the institution known as the ooku-the complex network of women related to the shogun and their living quarters deep within Edo castle-has been a popular subject of Japanese television dramas and movies. Brushing aside myths and fallacies that have long obscured our understanding, this thoroughly researched book provides an intimate look at the lives of the elite female residents of the shogun's elaborate compound. Drawing information from contemporary diaries and other private memoirs, as well as official records, the book gives detailed descriptions of the physical layout of their living quarters, regulations, customs, and even clothing, enabling us to actually visualize this walled-in world that was off limits for most of Japanese society. It also outlines the complex hierarchy of positions, and by shining a light on specific women, gives readers insight into the various factions within the ooku and the scandals that occasionally occurred. Both positive and negative aspects of life in the "great interior" are represented, and one learns how some of these high-ranking women wielded tremendous social as well as political power, at times influencing the decision-making of the ruling shoguns. In sum, this book is the most accurate overview and characterization of the ooku to date, revealing how it developed and changed during the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. A treasure trove of information, it will be a vital source for scholars and students of Japan studies, as well as women's studies, and for general readers who are interested in learning more about this fascinating women's institution and its significance in Japanese history and culture." - Patricia Fister, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto

Today medievalism is increasingly intelligible as a cultural lingua franca, produced in trans- and international contexts with a view to reaching popular international audiences, some of mass scope. This book offers new perspectives on international relations and how global concerns are made available through contemporary medievalist texts. It questions how research in medievalism may help us rethink the terms of internationalism and globalism within popular cultures, ideologies, and political formations. It investigates how the diverse media of medievalism (print; film and television; arts and crafts; fashion; digital media; clubs and fandom) affect its cultural meaning and circulation, and its social function, and engage questions of desire, gender and identity construction. As a whole, International Medievalism and Popular Culture differs from those studies which have concentrated on imaginative appropriations of the middle ages for domestic cultural contexts. It investigates rather how contemporary cultures engage with medievalism to map and model ideas of the international, the trans-national, the cosmopolitan and the global. This book includes examples from Europe, Britain, North America, Australia and the Arab world. It discusses the formation and the impact of popular medievalism in the globalised worlds of Braveheart, Disney and Harry Potter, but it also explores how the contemporary medieval imaginary generates international cultural perspectives, for example in considering Middle Eastern reception of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, the Byzantinism of Julia Kristeva, and Hedley Bull's postnationalist 'new medievalism'. International Medievalism in Popular Culture is an important contribution to medieval studies, cultural studies, and historical studies. It will be of value to undergraduate, postgraduate and academic readers, as well as to all interested in popular culture or medievalism.

Although Juan Domingo Perón's central role in Argentine history and the need for an unbiased assessment of his impact on his nation's cinema are beyond dispute, the existing scholarship on the subject is limited. In recent decades Argentina has witnessed a revival of serious film study, some of which has focused on the nation's classical movies and, in one case, on Peronism. None of this work has been translated into English, however.This is the first English-language book that offers an extensive assessment of Argentine cinema during first Peronism. It is also the first study in any language that concentrates systematically on the evolution of social attitudes reflected in Argentine movies throughout those years and that assesses the period's impact on subsequent filmmaking activity. By analyzing popular Argentine movies from this time through the prism of myth-second-order communication systems that present historically developed customs and attitudes as natural-the book traces the filmic construction of gender, criminality, race, the family, sports, and the military. It identifies in movies the development and evolution of mindsets and attitudes that may be construed as "Peronist." By framing its consideration of films from the Perón years in the context of earlier and later ones, it demonstrates that this period accelerates-and sometimes registers backward-looking responses to-earlier progressive mythic shifts, and it traces the development in the 1950s of a critical mindset that comes to fruition in the "new cinema" of the 1960s. Picturing Argentina: Myths, Movies, and the Peronist Vision is an important book for Latin American studies, film studies, and history collections.

Increased global interest in the Arctic poses challenges to contemporary international relations and many questions surround exactly why and how Arctic countries are asserting their influence and claims over their northern reaches and why and how non-Arctic states are turning their attention to the region. Despite the inescapable reality in the growth of interest in the Arctic, relatively little analysis on the international relations aspects of such interest has been done. Traditionally, international relations studies are focused on particular aspects of Arctic relations, but to date there has been no comprehensive effort to explain the region as a whole. Literature on Arctic politics is mostly dedicated to issues such as development, the environment and climate change, or indigenous populations. International relations, traditionally interested in national and international security, has been mostly silent in its engagement with Arctic politics. Essential concepts such as security, sovereignty, institutions, and norms are all key aspects of what is transpiring in the Arctic, and deserve to be explained in order to better comprehend exactly why the Arctic is of such interest. The sheer number of states and organizations currently involved in Arctic international relations make the region a prime case study for scholars, policymakers and interested observers. In this first systematic study of Arctic international relations, Robert W. Murray and Anita Dey Nuttall have brought together a group of the world's leading experts in Arctic affairs to demonstrate the multifaceted and essential nature of circumpolar politics. This book is core reading for political scientists, historians, anthropologists, geographers and any other observer interested in the politics of the Arctic region.

A book like this is long overdue because not many are aware of the numerous intersections between Philip Roth's fiction and world literature. In highlighting these intersections and uneasy passages, this comparative approach offers an important contribution to Philip Roth studies as well as to comparative literary study in general. The fourteen chapters on this book summon Roth's intertextual links to authors ranging from the anonymous writer of the medieval play Everyman, through Thoreau, Hawthorne, Crane, Ellison, Coover, and the New York intellectuals in the United States, to Swift, Chekhov, Svevo, Kafka, Schulz, Gombrowicz, Camus, and Klíma in Europe, and on to Coetzee in South Africa. The book does not deal with all the works in Roth's canon, but it offers a selection of works representing the different stages of Roth's development as a writer. By offering new readings of both well-studied and lesser-studied works, sometimes in unexpected company, the book discloses the critical difference that comparative scholarship can affect. The uneasy passages the book opens will not exhaust the numerous intersections between Roth and the work of other writers. The book's contribution is to place Roth's fiction firmly in a larger transnational context. Far from insular, Roth's work appears as deeply rooted in the American canon while at the same time showing a remarkable openness, a persistent need for contact with his European forebears, and true engagement with contemporary world literature. The transnational perspective of the book makes it important for the rapidly growing field of transatlantic and transnational American studies. The book will be value to collections in American literature and Jewish studies, comparative literature and criticism, and transatlantic and transnational American studies.

This book is an essential addition to the study of comparative black literature of the Americas; it will also fill the gap that exists on theoretical studies exploring black women's writing from the Spanish Caribbean. This book examines literary representations of the historic roots of black women's resistance in the United States and Cuba by studying the following texts by both African American and Afro-Cuban women from four different literary genres (autobiographical slave narrative, contemporary novel on slavery, testimonial narrative, and poetry): Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by the African American former slave Harriet Jacobs, Dessa Rose (1986) by the African American writer Sherley Ann Williams, Reyita, sencillamente: testimonio de una negra cubana nonagenarian [Simply Reyita. Testimonial Narrative of a Nonagenarian Black Cuban Woman] (1996), written/transcribed by the Afro-Cuban historian Daisy Rubiera Castillo from her interviews with her mother María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, "Reyita," and a selection of poems from the contemporary Afro-Cuban poets Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera. The study argues that the writers participate in black women's self-inscription in the historical process by positioning themselves as subjects of their history and seizing discursive control of their (hi)stories. Although the texts form part of separate discourses, the book explores the commonalities of the rhetorical devices and narrative strategies employed by the authors as they disassemble racist and sexist stereotypes, (re)constructing black female subjectivity through an image of active resistance against oppression, one that authorizes unconventional definitions of womanhood and motherhood. The book shows that in the womens' revisions of national history, their writings also demonstrate the pervasive role of racial and gender categories in the creation of a discourse of national identity, while promoting a historiography constructed within flexible borders that need to be negotiated constantly. The study's engagement in crosscultural exploration constitutes a step further in opening connections with a comparative literary study that is theoretically engaging, in order to include Afro-Cuban women writers and Afro-Caribbean scholars into scholarly discussions in which African American women have already managed to participate with a series of critical texts. The book explores connections between methods and perspectives derived from Western theories and from Caribbean and Black studies, while recognizing the black women authors studied as critics and scholars. In this sense, the book includes some of the writers' own commentaries about their work, taken from interviews (many of them conducted by the author Paula Sanmartín herself), as well as critical essays and letters. Black Women as Custodians of History adds a new dimension to the body of existing criticism by challenging the ways assumptions have shaped how literature is read by black women writers. Paula Sanmartín's study is a vivid demonstration of the strengths of embarking on multidisciplinary study. This book will be useful to several disciplines and areas of study, such as African diaspora studies, African American studies, (Afro) Latin American and (Afro) Caribbean studies, women's studies, genre studies, and slavery studies.

Ian McEwan s works have always shown an interest in the question of how fiction operates. This interest does not usually manifest on the formal level. A few of the early stories aside, his fictions are not formally experimental. McEwan tends to opt for those reliable patternings of space, time and narrative progression that enable readers to trust the authorial environment sufficiently to identify with characters and become invested, to some extent, in what happens to them. Readers frequently enter the mind or consciousness of a central character that of Stephen, in The Child in Time (1987), when he realizes he has lost his daughter at the supermarket, or Joe s, in Enduring Love (1997), when he helps saves a boy in a balloon from dying and observe the decisions they make and the actions that follow from them. Nonetheless, McEwan s early stories and first two short novels of the 1970s and early 1980s, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), in particular, contain characters who resist readerly identification. Despite McEwan s commitment, by and large, to naturalistic means of telling a story, his later novels also demonstrate a concern with opacity, as characters often pursue courses of action for reasons that are unclear to them. Equally often, these actions bear some relation to the intrinsic opacity or enigma of one s sexual desires, one s relation to one s mortality, or one s relation to the actions of those human beings who have gone before one, as this book will show. It is this focus on enigma in McEwan s work, whether sexual, mortal, or historical, that lends it to a psychoanalytic reading such as the kind pursued in this book, because for psychoanalysis there is no such thing as full access to one s self or to one s feelings or motivations. Given that one s relation to history is also opaque in the sense that one grasps fully or imagines one grasps fully only those historical events which predate or otherwise excludes one, this study seeks historical reasons for why McEwan sometimes blocks readerly identification with characters in the early fiction. For these characters are also products of their environments, environments which the characters relative opacity and unlikeability seems to offset and exaggerate or present in a manner showcased for one's judgment. And in this way the characters environment is denaturalized, to say the least. This book reveals how all of these works explore, to some extent, the human tendency to act and feel, in particular situations, in profound contradistinction to how one might prefer to think one would. This failure to coincide with one s image of how one would have expected, or preferred, to behave The Innocent s Leonard Marnham is not the cool, experienced lover of his imaginings, any more than Solar s Michael Beard is going to revamp his lifestyle or career produces instances of affective or imaginative excess, troubling images or feelings that can often only be allayed or dealt with by a further failure to coincide with one s desires. In this book, author Eluned Summers-Bremner shows that McEwan s interests in opacity not only become clear in significance and import but that his interests in human failure to coincide with one s views about the past and hopes for the future also appear as what they are: an ongoing concern with how one relates to the complex operation of human history.

This study aims at revising past and current emphasis on central and official British imperial establishments in the metropolis. The focus, rather, incorporates both central and peripheral manning techniques in London and in overseas territories. By using archival and published sources for the military, technical, medical and other professional cadres, plus the manpower enslaved, indentured or employed in executive categories, the study is intended to broaden our understanding of the base and middle strata of the imperial "pyramid". This book is an essential revaluation of British imperial methods that has a place in university and public libraries alongside works on Africa, Southeast Asia, India, Ceylon, the Pacific, and British North America.

"Kora notes: Tijan M. Sallah and the development of Gambian literature, an edited collection of essays principally on the writings of Tijan M. Sallah"--Introduction.

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (general editor: Victor H. Mair). Yecao (Wild Grass, a.k.a. Weeds), is a 1927 collection of twenty-three prose poems written by Lu Xun (1881-1936), who is China's foremost writer of the twentieth-century. The poems, written between 1924 and 1926, were first published serially in the journal Threads of Talk from 1924 to 1927. This prose poem collection -a literary masterpiece in the eyes of many- features some of Lu Xun's most complex and psychologically dense creative works; Lu Xun himself is purported to have said his "entire philosophy is contained in his Yecao." Despite the significance attributed to this collection within Lu Xun's literary corpus, until now there has not been a single comprehensive English-language study of Yecao. Part of the reason for this considerable gap in the scholarship can be attributed to the fact that fiction has been given primacy in most literary studies of Lu Xun, and prose poetry (sanwen shi) as a genre has generally not been well represented -if at all- in surveys, anthologies, and other collections of twentieth-century Chinese literature. A related cause is Yecao's generic uniqueness, which frustrates efforts to locate it within the canon of modern Chinese literature. Yecao also poses interpretive problems for its readers, because of its unprecedented experimental style (i.e., a lack of commensurability with familiar Chinese literary genres, traditional or modern) and the intricacy and variety of the prose poems, which are notable for their emotional intensity, complex paradoxical structures, symbolic density, sometimes-transparent references to contemporary historical events, and overall generic ambiguity. The combination of the above factors has led to this unique and exceptionally creative collection being frequently ignored or, at best, dealt with in a cursory and selective fashion in much of the English-language Lu Xun scholarship. This study remedies the absence of a comprehensive English-language study of Lu Xun's Yecao and is the perfect companion to the reading and study of Yecao. It is not only a useful reference work and bibliographical source but also an informative contribution to and dialogue with the extant scholarship. Most importantly, this study engages with the Yecao prose poems in a rigorous scholarly fashion while simultaneously allowing each prose poem to influence its reader and determine directions and conclusions made during the interaction of interpretation. This book deftly addresses in detail key aspects of context and content integral to interpreting Yecao. As the first English-language companion to Yecao (providing bibliographical resources, historical context, background on the prose poem genre, an elaboration of Lu Xun's mature aesthetic praxis and philosophical outlook), the book's interpretations of Lu Xun's prose poems will further aspire to bring Yecao and a psychoanalytically informed practice of close reading closer to the fore of Lu Xun studies specifically and Chinese literary studies in general.

This study is a thorough examination of the entire historical scope of the Chinese Buddhist bibliography, including its historical foundations, textual classifications, criteria of authenticity, and collections made by individual catalogers. The need for such a study is urgent, for although references to and even in-depth studies of individual Buddhist catalogs and the data they contain have been written, there has not been until now an investigation into the entire historical scope of Buddhist bibliography in China. Understanding just what those who organized the canon over the centuries have left out, or preserved, is key to recovering a fuller appreciation for the development of Buddhism in East Asia in all its complexity. The study of individual bibliographers positions is equally crucial for the understanding of standards of authenticity and assignment of value to one group of scriptures over others. History of books, libraries, and learning in China would be incomplete without studying the history of Buddhist bibliography. Ultimately, it is necessary to study Buddhist bibliography because it represents the Tripitaka, the largest and most influential collection of sacred scriptures in the world, and because this collection needs to be incorporated into comparative discussions of Scripture and Canon in world history. This is the first study that covers the entire historical scope of Buddhist bibliography in China in any European language, as well as the only study that provides detailed descriptions of all influential catalogs of the Buddhist canon written in the second through the end of the tenth centuries. It is the first attempt, in both European and Asian languages, to provide a comparative analysis between ideas, and these theological and historiographical principles used in creation of an authoritative canon by Christian and Buddhist scholars. The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka is an important book for Asian studies, history of classifications, textual criticism, history of books, and history of libraries. This book would be appropriate for courses in Chinese Buddhism, Chinese history, and Chinese literature and civilizations. It will also be an excellent supplemental textbook for courses in comparative religious studies and comparative religious scripture. Watch Dr. Tanya Storch speak about the book!

Motherhood and maternal relationships abound in much literature by Chicana writers, even when these themes appear to be minor elements of the fiction. In novels in particular, maternal relationships appear quite frequently, attesting to the significance of this theme. In novels by Denise Ch vez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Carla Trujillo, and Melinda Palacio, mother-daughter relationships are central to understanding the protagonists shaping of identity amidst interlocking forces of sexism, racism, homophobia, and classicism within the dominant culture. Ch vez, Castillo, and Cisneros are arguably the most well-known and most-studied of Chicana writers. Ch vez s novels, including The Last of the Menu Girls (1986) and Loving Pedro Infante (2001) have been the subject of multiple studies, as have her poetry and drama. Novels by Castillo, especially So Far From God (1993) and Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), have been exhaustively explored. Cisneros s status as a major American writer was sealed by the enormous success of The House on Mango Street (1984) and her collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek (1991). Novels by Carla Trujillo (What Night Brings) and Melinda Palacio (Ocotillo Dreams), however, have only recently been studied, and their works undoubtedly have a significant place within the Chicana literary canon. Despite the production of these important works, literary criticism has tended to ignore the prevalence of the mother-daughter relationships in these novels. Writers such as these have been highly influential in drawing attention to the rich Chicana literary landscape that has historically been marginalized within the American literary canon. Their novels offer critical glimpses into the worlds in which Chicanas and other women of color must navigate on a daily basis. Cognizant of their identities as non-white women maneuvering within and outside dominant culture and their own Chicana/o families, Chicana writers create fictional works that resist silence and invisibility. Despite the growing literary scholarship on Chicana writers, few, if any, studies have exhaustively explored themes of motherhood, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships in their novels. When discussions of motherhood and mother-daughter relationships do occur in literary scholarship, they tend to mostly be a backdrop to a larger conversation on themes such as identity, space, and sexuality, for example. Mother-daughter relationships have been ignored in much literary criticism, but this book reveals that maternal relationships are crucial to the study of Chicana literature; more precisely, examining maternal relationships provides insight to Chicana writers rejection of intersecting power structures that otherwise silence Chicanas and women of color. This book advances the field of Chicana literary scholarship through a discussion of Chicana writers efforts to re-write the script of maternity outside of existing discourses that situate Chicana mothers as silent and passive and the subsequent mother-daughter relationship as a source of tension and angst. Chicana writers are actively engaged in the process of re-writing motherhood that resists the image of the static, disempowered Chicana mother; on the other hand, these same writers engage in broad representations of Chicana mother-daughter relationships that are not merely a source of conflict but also a means in which both mothers and daughters may achieve subjectivity. While some of the texts studied do present often conflicted relationships between mothers and their daughters, the novels do not comfortably accept this script as the rule; rather, the writers included in this study are highly invested in re-writing Chicana motherhood as a source of empowerment even as their works present strained maternal relationships. Chicana writers have challenged the pervasiveness of the problematic virgin/whore binary which has been the motif on which Chicana womanhood/motherhood has been defined, and they resist the construction of maternity on such narrow terms. Many of the novels included in this study actively foreground a conscious resistance to the limiting binaries of motherhood symbolized in the virgin/whore split. The writers critically call for a rethinking of motherhood beyond this scope as a means to explore the empowering possibilities of maternal relationships. This book is an important contribution to the fields of Chicana/Latina and American literary scholarship.

Rebecca Brown has been dubbed the great secret of American letters. This Seattle-based lesbian author is especially known for being a writers writer, although her award-winning and widely translated book The Gifts of the Body is popular with an international reading audience. Brown s powerful, original, and extremely diverse oeuvre contains collections of essays and short stories, a modern bestiary, a fictionalized autobiography, a memoir in the guise of a medical dictionary, a libretto for a dance opera, a play, and various kinds of fantasy. Brown has a uniquely recognizable voice, writing as she does in a stark style that combines the minimalism of her literary ancestor Samuel Beckett with some of the incantatory rhythms of Gertrude Stein and the dark humor of Franz Kafka. Brown has been praised as an important source of inspiration by several contemporary authors such as the acclaimed Scottish writer Ali Smith. Unlike her more illustrious lesbian colleagues Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca Brown has been working in the shadows for the past thirty years to compose a challenging and highly rewarding oeuvre. Her writings form a fascinating countervoice to the current trend of homonormalization. Brown s unapologetic representations of violent or imbalanced same-sex relations and communities, as well as her fictional engagement with a history of homosexual stigmatization (and its continuation into the present), are of great cultural significance. Yet academic investigations of her oeuvre are still largely lacking. Thanks to its analysis of identities and identifications, this book covers the main areas that are of interest when studying Brown s oeuvre: the spheres of the social and the historical. In addition, the book reveals how literary texts like Brown s can resonate, substantiate, and inflect queer theory as well as social and psychoanalytic theories on (gendered or sexual) identifications. This book is the first study to examine critically the entire oeuvre of Rebecca Brown. It approaches Brown s work from the perspective of queer theory and social theory on identities and identifications. This framework is supplemented with critical appropriations of classic psychoanalytic thinking on the related concepts of incorporation, melancholia, and narcissism. A number of critics have recently sought to redefine theories on social identity-construction by shifting the debate from the notion of identity to the more dynamic concept of identification. Such theories benefit from a concerted attention to literary texts that embody identification processes, put them to the test, and make them tangible. Brown s closely considered writings offer an unusually rewarding case study in this respect, and require attention to both the spheres of the social and the historical. The book explores the processes of identity formation in Brown s work in two social contexts: that of biological and queer kinship. It examines Brown s demythologization of the nuclear family and argues that in the context of queer kinship, too, Brown s presentations take the form of a critical examination (tackling taboo subjects such as identity-formation in positions of extreme dependency). The book also explores the historical identifications taking place in Brown s oeuvre, addressing their autobiographical nature and contesting a reading of Brown s characters as traditional minority subjects in full possession of their life stories. This is an important book for research on women writers, queer studies, and contemporary literature.

Euripides' Medea is one of the most popular Greek tragedies in the contemporary theatre. Numerous modern adaptations see the play as painting a picture of the struggle of the powerless under the powerful, of women against men, of foreigners versus natives. The play has been adapted into colonial and historical contexts to lend its powerful resonances to issues of current import. Black Medea is an anthology of six adaptations of the Euripidean tragedy by contemporary American playwrights that present Medea as a woman of color, combined with interviews, analytical essays and introductions which frame the original and adaptations. Placing six adaptations side by side and interviewing the playwrights in order to gain their insights into their work allows the reader to see how an ancient Greek tragedy has been used by contemporary American artists to frame and understand African American history. Of the six plays present in the volume, three have never before been published and one of the others has been out of print for almost thirty years. Thus the volume makes available to students, scholars and artists a significant body of dramatic work not currently available. Black Medea is an important book for scholars, students, artists and libraries in African American studies, classics, theatre and performance studies, women and gender Studies, adaptation theory and literature. Theatre companies, universities, community theatres, and other producing organizations will also be interested in the volume.

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series (General Editor: Victor H. Mair). Although numerous book-length studies of language and modernity in China and Japan can be found even in English, little has been written in any language on the question of linguistic modernity in Korea. Infected Korean Language, Purity Versus Hybridity by noted journalist and writer Koh Jongsok is a collection of critical essays about Korean language and writing situated at the nexus of modern Korean history, politics, linguistics, and literature. In addition to his journalistic and writing experience, Koh also happens to have a keen interest in language and linguistics, and he has received postgraduate training at the highest level in these subjects at the Sorbonne. This book bears witness to the trials and tribulations-historical, technical and epistemological-by which the Korean language achieved "linguistic modernity" under trying colonial and neo-colonial circumstances. In particular, Koh tackles questions of language ideology and language policy, modern terminology formation, and inscriptional practices (especially the highly politicized questions of vernacular script versus Chinese characters, and of orthography) in an informed and sensitive way. The value of Koh's essays lies in the fact that so little has been written in a critical and politically progressive vein-whether scholarly or otherwise-about the processes whereby traditional Korean inscriptional and linguistic practices became "modern". Indeed, the one group of academics from whom one would expect assistance in this regard, the "national language studies" scholars in Korea, have been so blinkered by their nationalist proclivities as to produce little of interest in this regard. Koh, by contrast, is one of precious few concerned and engaged public intellectuals and creative writers writing on this topic in an easily understandable way. Little or nothing is available in English about modern Korean language ideologies and linguistic politics. This book analyzes the linguistic legacies of the traditional Sinographic Cosmopolis and modern Japanese colonialism and shows how these have been further complicated by the continued and ever-more hegemonic presence of English in post-Liberation Korean linguistic life. It exposes and critiques the ways in which the Korean situation is rendered even more complex by the fact that all these issues have been debated in Korea in an intellectual environment dominated by deeply conservative and racialized notions of "purity", minjok (ethno-nation) and kugo or "national language" (itself an ideological formation owing in large part to Korea's experience with Japan). Koh sheds light on topics like: linguistic modernity and the problem of dictionaries and terminology; Korean language purism and the quest for "pure Korean" on the part of Korean linguistic nationalists; the beginnings of literary Korean in translation and the question of "translationese" in Korean literature; the question of the boundaries of "Korean literature" (if an eighteenth-century Korean intellectual writes a work of fiction in Classical Chinese, is it "Korean literature"?); the vexed issue of the "genetic affiliation" of Korean and the problems with searches for linguistic "bloodlines"; the frequent conflation of language and writing (i.e., of Korean and han'gul) in Korea; the English-as-Official-Language debate in South Korea; the relationship between han'gul and Chinese characters; etc. This book will be of value to those with an interest in language and history in East Asian in general, as well twentieth-century Korean language, literature, politics and history, in particular. The book will be an unprecedented and invaluable resource for students of modern Korean language and literature.

English has long emerged as the lingua franca of globalization but has been somehow estranged in the hands or mouths of aliens, from Joseph Conrad to Chang-rae Lee. Haltingly, their alien characters come to speak in the Anglo-American tongue, yet what emerges is skewed by accents, syntax, body language, and nonstandard contextual references-an uncanny, off-kilter language best described as Alienglish.Either an alien's English that estranges or an alienating English because it sounds so natural, it issues forth from an involuntarily forked tongue and split psyche, operating on two registers, one clear and comprehensible, the other occluded and unfamiliar. Alienglish hence diagnoses the literal split in language or the alien's English; it further suggests the metaphorical splits either of aliens in an English-speaking world or of the English language dubbing and animating an alien world. While such alien performances are largely ventriloquized by native writers in the name of aliens, most blatant of which are Western Orientalism and ethnic self-Orientalism, there were and still are exceptional nonnative writers in Anglo-American tongues, as a direct consequence of Eastern diasporas to the nineteenth-century British Empire and then to the twentieth-century U.S. Empire. These writers include Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Jerzy Kosinski, Kazuo Ishiguro, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Ha Jin, who all seem to share a predicament: the strange English tongue they belabor to host in an effort to feel at home in the Anglo-American host culture as well as in their own bodies deemed foreign bodies. Wherever one hails from, an alien with a tongue graft is doomed to be either a tragic outcast or a pathetic clown, caught between two irreconcilable languages and cultures, searching for an identity in English yet haunted by a phantom tongue pain. The book's methodology fuses the scholarly with the poetic, a montage that springs from the very nature of diaspora, which is as much about rational decisions of relocation as, put simply, feelings. The heart of diaspora, breaking like a cracked voice, is resealed by the head, making both stronger-until another thin line opens up. Only through this double helix of head and heart, thinking and feeling, can one hope to map the DNA of diaspora. Such an unorthodox mélange balances the tongue as a cultural expression from the body and the tongue as a visceral reaction of the body. Any potential crack amid the superstructure of global English and its underside of alien tongues promises discovery of a new world, which has always been there. Alienglish hence arrays itself on a spectrum from the English's Alien to the Alien's English, from white representations of the Other to aliens' self-representations. The usual Orientalist suspects of Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and Gilbert and Sullivan swell to capture affectless aliens from sci-fi, Stieg Larsson, and Lian Hearn. The book then turns to images of Shanghai and Macau, Asian Canadian Joy Kogawa and Evelyn Lau, and the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho. It concludes with an examination of the new China hands (Ha Jin, et al.) and the global media's search for the sublime. The title of this book Alienglish appropriately conveys the uniqueness of this book, which will be a useful contribution to Asian and Asian American studies, comparative literature, diaspora studies, film studies, popular culture, and world literature.

Many cultures, including Greeks, Romans, French, and British, have taken great pride in legends that recount the foundation of their society. This book demonstrates the contexts in which a medieval British matriarchal legend, the Albina narrative, was paired over time with a patriarchal narrative, which was already widely disseminated, leading to the attribution of British origins to the warrior Brutus. By the close of the Middle Ages, the Albina tale had appeared in multiple versions in French, Latin, English, Welsh, and Dutch. This study investigates the classical roots of the narrative and the ways it was manipulated in the Middle Ages to function as a national foundation legend. Of especial interest are the dynamic qualities of the text: how it was adapted over the span of two centuries to meet the changing needs of medieval writers and audiences. The currency in the Middle Ages of the Albina narrative is attested to by its inclusion in nearly all the extant manuscripts of the Middle English Prose Brut, many of the French and Latin Bruts, and in a variety of other chronicles and romances. In total, there are over 230 manuscripts surviving today that contain versions of the Albina tale. Despite this, however, relatively little modern scholarship has focused on this widely disseminated and adapted legend. This book provides the first-ever overview of the entire Albina tradition, from its roots to its eventual demise as a popularly accepted narrative. The Classical basis of the narrative in the Hypermnestra story and the ways it was manipulated in the medieval era to function as a national foundation legend are considered. Folkloric, biblical, and legal influences on the development of the tradition are addressed. The tale is viewed through a variety of lenses to suggest ways it may have functioned or was put to use in the Middle Ages. The study concludes with an overview of the narrative's demise in the Renaissance. This is a useful reference source for medievalists and other scholars interested in chronicle studies, literature, folklore, foundation narratives, manuscript studies, and historiography. It will also be useful to art historians who wish to study the various depictions of the Albina narrative in illuminated texts. The tale's emphasis on matriarchy and its subversion of the accepted societal norm will attract the interest of scholars in feminist studies. As the first analysis of the Albina tradition as a whole, it will be a valuable cornerstone for later studies.