Jenni Ramone

Offering a thorough introduction to notions of gender in contemporary global literature, Global Literature and Gender uses postcolonial theories alongside theories of space and place, theories of globalization, and reference to the Posthuman and the Anthropocene as competing narratives of the contemporary. This book argues for the ongoing but very current significance of gender as an organizing category, while also revealing the fluidity and boundary defying nature of gender in twenty-first-century literature. Divided into three sections, looking at femininity, masculinity, and transgender, Jenni Ramone: Examines globalization’s uneasy relationship with theories which foreground gender and considers gender as a challenge to globalization; Analyses embodied labour, global travel, trade, and tourism; Discusses the ways in which globalization and masculinity are likewise at odds; Considers a diverse range of themes and genres, including pearl-diving, taxi driving, space travel, authorship, surrogacy, modern-day slavery, Afrofuturism, Objectophilia, Stigma, Dehumanisation, Passing, and romance tourism; Engages with a vast range of innovative contemporary works, including those by Akwaeke Emezi, Alain Mabanckou, Mieko Kawakami, Meera Syal, Helen Heath, Kei Miller, Deji Bryce Olukotun, jaye simpson, Hideki Noda, Dany Laferrière, Zadie Smith, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Teju Cole, Sherley Anne Williams, Helen Oyeyemi, and Arundhati Roy. Global Literature and Gender is an essential intervention for researchers and students of globalization, twenty-first-century literature, and gender.

Global Literature and Gender

Salman Rushdie's writing is engaged with translation in many ways: translator-figures tell and retell stories in his novels, while acts of translation are catalysts for climactic events. Covering his major novels as well as his often-neglected short stories and writing for children, Salman Rushdie and Translation explores the role of translation in Rushdie's work. In this book, Jenni Ramone draws on contemporary translation theory to analyse the part translation plays in Rushdie's appropriation of historical and contemporary Indian narratives of independence and migration.

Salman Rushdie and Translation

This book asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives. It contextualises these close readings through new interpretations of local literary marketplaces to assert the significance of local, not global meanings. The book offers longer case studies on novels that stage important reading moments: Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (1953), Leonardo Padura’s Adios, Hemingway (2001), Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), Chibundhu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017), and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016). Chapters argue that while India’s literary market was disrupted by Partition, literature offers a means of moving beyond trauma; in post-Revolutionary Cuba, the Special Period led to exploitation of Cuban literary culture, resulting in texts that foreground reading spaces; in Nigeria, the market hosts meeting, negotiation, reflection, and trade, including the writer’s trade; while Black consciousness bookshops and writing in Britain operated to challenge the UK literary market, a project still underway. This book is a vindication of reading, and of the resistant power and creative potential of local literary marketplaces. It insists on ‘located reading’, enabling close reading of world literatures sited in their local materialities.

Located Reading

Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace

Covering a wide range of textual forms and geographical locations, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing: New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates is an advanced introduction to prominent issues in contemporary postcolonial literary studies. With chapters written by leading scholars in the field, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing includes: ·Explorations of key contemporary topics, from ecocriticism, refugeeism, economics, faith and secularism, and gender and sexuality, to the impact of digital humanities on postcolonial studies ·Introductions to a wide range of genres, from the novel, theatre and poetry to life-writing, graphic novels, film and games · In-depth analysis of writing from many postcolonial regions including Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, and African American writing Covering Anglophone and Francophone texts and contexts, and tackling the relationship between postcolonial studies and world literature, with a glossary of key critical terms, this is an essential text for all students and scholars of contemporary postcolonial studies.

New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates

The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing

Postcolonial Theories is a lively introduction to postcolonial theories, contexts and literatures which presents both the theory and practice to students in approachable and attractive ways. Jenni Ramone includes discussion of a wide range of influential theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, Edward Said, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Paul Gilroy and Trinh T. Minh-ha. She also demonstrates postcolonial ideas through compelling readings of a wide range of exciting literary texts, including: • Nawal El Saadawi's God Dies by the Nile • Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger • Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy • Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother. Covering a diverse array of geographical locations, and featuring a helpful timeline and annotated bibliography, this is essential reading for anyone with an interest in postcolonial theories and how they have continued to adapt in the wake of globalization, digital technology and neo-colonialism.

Postcolonial Theories

Gemma Twitchen

Boundaries is a collection of work offering creative and critical responses to methods of making, breaking, and negotiating boundaries. The concern of this book is not simply to address the theme of boundaries; we also hope to breach the boundaries surrounding the usual ways that such a theme would ordinarily be debated. As such, this collection includes papers from both arts and science disciplines including literary, theatrical, historical, linguistic, educational, travel writing and geographical perspectives, from academics, postgraduate research students, postgraduate creative writers, and creative writers without institutional affiliation. The book is interdisciplinary in its approach, and boundary-crossing in its presentation: instead of organising the collection in sections of papers according to whether they are predominantly creative or critical in approach, the papers are presented together, and are organised in three sections according to the way that those papers approach the boundary that they perceive: whether that boundary is being made, negotiated, or broken. In addition to the main papers in the three sections, the collection is framed by interviews with the plenary speakers who were invited to the conference, Adam Roberts and Hanan Al-Shaykh. These are writers whose works repeatedly deal with boundaries of form, genre, and audience, and the interviews included here start to explore the range of boundaries existing in their work and in their lives as writers. The format of their contribution to this book allows another boundary to be crossed, by including formal, structured interviews as another medium of developing the debate. Taking the principle that the idea of the boundary is, in fact and in imagination, boundless, Jenni Ramone and Gemma Twitchen gather together in Boundaries sixteen texts that stage in adventurous and provocative ways the endless reconceptualisation of this most enigmatic of concepts. Boundaries is at once a startling reassessment and necessary reorientation around its subject, in which critical acuity and creative panache cross and recross the borders of imaginative space. To say that this is a boundary-breaking collection, that frontiers have been transgressed, limits erased and hitherto invisible liminal territories mapped, is only to draw a line underneath the limitless inventiveness of the transgressive and translative interventions of this volume. The reader of Boundaries will find herself bound in a nutshell that makes her a ruler of infinite space. Ramone and Twitchen are to be applauded for redrawing the map and erasing the borders between the critical, the creative and the cultural, with such passion and precision. Julian Wolfreys, author of Writing London: Inventions of the City Make, break, negotiate - or, if you will, here are three impossible things to do with conceptual boundaries and all before breakfast, or at least middle-age; so say the exciting collective of young scholars, critics and writers who come together here. The result is much brilliant making, breaking and negotiating of all sorts of boundaries - but above all the boundary between the critical and the creative. Nothing could be more timely, or important. John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature, University of Lancaster

Boundaries

Helen Cousins

The Richard & Judy Book Club Reader is the first book to consider the impact of the televised book club on reading practices and the publishing and promotion of books in the UK, in comparison with other reading groups, including Oprah's Book Club and online reading communities. The club, the books and their readers are considered from the perspectives of literary, cultural and media studies in this compelling collection.

Jenni Ramone

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