Essays on Nepali, Indian, and American literature

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Jonathan Boulter

Written in a clear, accessible language, this guide challenges and encourages students to grapple with the difficult ideas and questions posed by Beckett's texts.

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Roger Y. Clark

"In Stranger Gods Roger Clark offers a study of Salman Rushdie's seven published novels, with a special focus on his earliest, Grimus, and his most powerful and provocative, Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses. Clark shows how Rushdie employs cosmology, mythology, and mysticism to structure otherworldly dramas that are fascinating in their own right, as well as crucial to the more worldly points Rushdie makes about literary tradition, history, ethnicity, and the politics of religion."--BOOK JACKET.

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Mariana C. Zinni

This exciting new book is the first comprehensive study on mimesis in the work of fray Bernardino de Sahagun. The volume deals with three concepts that cannot be avoided when thinking about the discursive colonization that took place in New Spain: mimesis (and its correlate, mimicry), hermeneusis and narration, and their relationship with a monological and monolithic Christian narrative coming from Europe. This narrative started to tremble because of the heterogeneity of the non-European discourses confronting the Occidental rationality that was arriving with the conquistadors and friars. The author suggests the presence of a narrative pact crystallized in the use of Nahua metaphors with Christian content and of discursive models that don't belong to European rhetoric, i.e., the huehuetlatolli, an ancient form of exhortation and courtly speech, among other rhetorical devices. The primary objective of these textual practices was to reshape the symbolic world of the Nahuas from the inside. But this rhetorical operation would also contaminate Hispanic discourses. This study proposes a reading guided by the concept of "discursive colonization" -paying special attention to the different levels of imagination and narration-, and its hermeneutic ambiguities, in order to analyze the dominant symbolic construction of European modernity, now deeply imbricated with processes of conquest and evangelization.--Publisher.

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Steven D. Martinson

This book is the first to investigate the thematics, form, and function of the writings of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) in light of his multidisciplinary activities. The term "harmonious tension" stems from the Jewish-German intellectual Moses Mendelssohn, to whom Schiller was indebted. The central symbol for the tension-killed integration of literature, physiology, philosophy, history, and music in Schiller's oeuvre is the stringed instrument. Schiller's knowledge of the problems of rupture, dissociation, and disintegration marking modern history both before and after the French Revolution inform the vast majority of his works. The writer's conscious awareness of the limits of his own theorizing works against the popular image of Schiller as an idealist. Responsive to the debate on canon formation as well as to the impact of New Historicism, this study examines not only most of Schiller's major writings, but also some of the lesser-known works from the beginning to the end of the author's career. The study reflects these writings back to the larger cultural contexts in which they were written while remaining responsive to the developments and changes in Schiller's perspective as a writer.