The mother/daughter plot

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Noel Carroll

For decades, the horror genre has been a major popular entertainment and has dominated the publishing and film industries. Yet there exists no philosophical examination of the genre - the time for its aesthetic analysis is ripe. Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in having their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want to be horrified?

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Karin U. Schestokat

"This book analyzes the travelogues of four German women who journeyed through Cameroon when it was a German colony (1884-1918). Three of the women - Haase, Rein-Wuhrmann, and Ziemann - present their experiences as exciting adventures in a world that will profit from European progress and the teachings of Christianity. The fourth, Thorbecke, is eventually able to accept the Africans and their customs on their own terms. These travelogues were used as recruiting tools to entice other German women to come to Cameroon, and they are a reflection of the German society's mindset at the cusp of the twentieth century. As documentation of the identity formation and learning processes of their authors, they give testimony to these women's openness, tolerance, and adaptability to the social and cultural environments of various African tribes in Cameroon."--BOOK JACKET.

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Søren Frank

"We live in an age of migration and more and more authors have migrant backgrounds. Migration and Literature offers a thorough and thought-provoking examination of the thematic and formal role of migration in four contemporary and canonized novelists: Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjaerstad. This book examines how these novelists reflect, problematize, and "resolve" the problems set by the migratory world and analyzes how the novels employ discursive strategies which emphasize their migratory and homeless form."--Jacket.

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Simon Haines

How do human beings experience themselves? I "have" my emotions, passions or feelings, my ideas, thoughts or reasons, my memories or dreams; I "make" decisions and choices: but what is this "I" which does the "having" and the "making"? Sometimes philosophers make this question explicit in their work. But often they don't, and poets hardly ever do. If we read some of the greatest works of poetry and philosophy in the Western world, the Iliad, Antigone, the Divine Comedy, Coriolanus, the Confessions, the Meditations, the Republic, Mark's Gospel, the Epistle to the Romans, the Prince, we usually find Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Augustine, Plato or Machiavelli simply working with a conception of the "self". For many of them this "I" is something like a nucleus, an inner point out of which decisions and reasoning just issue forth: the feelings, memories etc. are all "outside" it, like a kind of envelope. And other people have equivalent centres of self. But for other writers there is no nucleus of this kind; all the passions, ideas, memories and reasons together, even the decisions and choices, just are the self. I am my emotions, ideas and decisions. To an extent I also am other selves; they and their passions and ideas are not always so distinct from me and mine. This book explores a dozen or more of these great works to see which writer thinks which, and why this might be important.