Literatura, memoria e imaginación en América Latina

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Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley

Walking Naboth's Vineyard brings together nine prominent scholars to present new and valuable perspectives on the work of Jonathan Swift. In recent years Swift has been increasingly reconsidered and recast as a distinctly Irish writer, and there is little doubt that his artistic career was shaped by Ireland's troubled political life. Literary critics and scholars, as well as scholars of Irish literature, will find this collection unique in that it explores Swift's life and writing in a distinctively Irish context and considers how Swift was influenced as a member of a population that was divided against itself, colonized by a neighboring kingdom, and politically and culturally marginalized. These essays demonstrate how, despite Swift's ambivalence about his Irish nationality, he found Ireland's worldly position a close parallel to his own complex position in the political and cultural worlds in which he lived.

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Mary Y. Hallab

"In [book title], [author] examines the mythic figure of the vampire from its origins in early Greek and Slavic folklore, its transformation by Romantics like Byron, Le Fanu, and Stoker, and its diverse representations in present-day popular culture. The allure of the vampire, [author] argues, lies in its persistent undeadness, its refusal to accept its mortal destiny of death and decay. Vampires appeal to our fear of dying and our hope for immortality, and as a focus for our doubts and speculations, vampire literature offers answers to many of our most urgent questions about the meaning of death, the nature of the human soul, and its possible survival after bodily dissolution."--Back cover.

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Robin Blaser

"Spanning four decades of meditation on the avant-garde in poetry, art, and philosophy, the essays collected in The Fire reveal Robin Blaser's strikingly fresh perspective on "New American" poets, deconstructive philosophies, current events, and the state of humanities now. His response to the cultural and political events of his time has been to construct a poetic voice that offers a singular perspective on a shareable world - and to pose that voice alongside others as a source of countermemory and potential agency. Conceived as conversations, these essays brilliantly reflect that ethos as they re-read the cultural events of the past fifty years."--Publisher description.

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Kole Omotoso

This is a controversial new study on Africa's two most widely read and, arguably, her finest writers. Despite their shared levels of prestige, each represents a distinct pole of Nigerian writing. On the one hand, there's Soyinka, the playful imagist steeped in the myth and magic of his native Yoruba culture; at the other end of the spectrum, Achebe's internalized Igbo cultural traditions. Kole Omotoso - himself a prolific writer and prize-winning Nigerian novelist - explores and defines the differences in style, background, and vision between the two men. Individual chapters describe their childhood, their cultural influences, political involvement, their stand during the Nigerian civil war, their attitudes to the world at large, their contribution to the language debate in African literatures, and there is also a chapter devoted to Achebe's and Soyinka's responses to their critics. The works of Achebe and Soyinka are considered against three main agendas: the pan-African agenda, the Nigerian nation-state agenda, and the ethnic national agenda. Despite their shared nationality, their contribution towards creating 'a community of sensibilities' in Nigeria is questioned by the author in terms of the instability that has bedevilled Nigeria and, by extension, other African countries.