Challenging assumptions about science fiction’s Western origins, Nathaniel Isaacson traces the development of the genre in China, from the late Qing Dynasty through the New Culture Movement. Through careful examination of a wide range of visual and print media—including historical accounts of the institutionalization of science, pictorial representations of technological innovations, and a number of novels and short stories—Isaacson makes a case for understanding Chinese science fiction as a product of colonial modernity. By situating the genre’s emergence in the transnational traffic of ideas and material culture engendered by the presence of colonial powers in China’s economic and political centers, Celestial Empires explores the relationship between science fiction and Orientalist discourse. In doing so it offers an innovative approach to the study of both vernacular writing in twentieth-century China and science fiction in a global context.

For fifty years Samuel Delany has cultivated a special relationship with language in works of fiction, criticism, and memoir that have garnered critical praise and legions of fans. The present volume – the first in a series – reveals a new dimension of his genius. In Search of Silence presents over a decade’s worth of Delany’s private journals, commencing in 1957 when he was still a student at the Bronx High School of Science, and ending in 1969 when he was living in San Francisco and on the verge of reconceiving the novel that would become Dhalgren. In these pages, Delany muses on the writing of the stories that will establish him as a science fiction wunderkind, the early years of his marriage to the poet Marilyn Hacker, performances as a singer-songwriter during the heyday of the American folk revival, travels in Europe, experiences in a New York City commune, and much more – and crosses paths with artists working in many genres, including poets such as Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Marie Ponsot, and science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ. Delany scholar Kenneth R. James presents the journal entries alongside generous samplings of story outlines, poetry, fragments of novels and essays that have never seen publication, and more; James also provides biographical synopses and an extensive set of endnotes to supply contextual information and connect journal material to Delany’s published work.

Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae’s latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book’s three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader’s companion is available at XXXX.site.wesleyan.edu.

Publication trilingue atour de la pensée de Merleau-PontyTrilingual studies concerning the thought of Merleau-PontyPubblicazione trilingue intorno al pensiero di Merleau-Ponty

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details – motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic – negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.

In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the American working class. He writes with an intimacy that is unique in American poetry, and echoes previous comparisons of his oeuvre to that of Walt Whitman. The singularity of his voice resonates here through the prism of his realization of self through a lifelong project of the integration of American and Chinese culture. The work is Daoist in influence and structure as it echoes both a harmonic realization of context and the intuitive and transcendent dance of body, mind, and spirit.

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.

Today, movie theaters are packed with audiences of all ages marveling to exciting science fiction blockbusters, many of which are also critically acclaimed. However, when the science fiction film genre first emerged in the 1950s, it was represented largely by exploitation horror films—lurid, culturally disreputable, and appealing to a niche audience of children and sci-fi buffs. How did the genre evolve from B-movie to blockbuster? Escape Velocity charts the historical trajectory of American science fiction cinema, explaining how the genre transitioned from eerie low-budget horror like It Came from Outer Space to art films like Slaughterhouse-Five, and finally to the extraordinary popularity of hits like E.T. Bradley Schauer draws on primary sources such as internal studio documents, promotional materials, and film reviews to explain the process of cultural, aesthetic, and economic legitimation that occurred between the 1950s and 1980s, as pulp science fiction tropes were adapted to suit the tastes of mainstream audiences. Considering the inescapable dominance of today’s effects-driven blockbusters, Escape Velocity not only charts the history of science fiction film, but also gives an account of the origins of contemporary Hollywood.

Don Giovanni chooses a piazza as a place for a lover’s tryst: a piazza that was once, in other times, a theatre of torture and death. The recurring vision of a wooden monument in flames, erected in the great piazza in memory of a man of free thought, is a source of constant disquiet for Don Giovanni, a frightfully terrible trial that evokes fear, anxiety, terror and horror. The image of the wooden monument burning keeps coming back to Don Giovanni’s mind, to the extent that it becomes an obsession, which in the end the great personage realises it somehow represents the inexorable tragic epilogue of his own life. A group of ten people, men and women, persecute Don Giovanni, the loathed seducer, manifestly seeking revenge. Again and again they scorn and sully his senses, the source of his faculty of love, with the aim of crippling his sense of taste, hearing, smell, touch and sight. Deformed in body and humiliated in thought, Don Giovanni wanders the capitals of the world, desperate, now incapable of loving, doomed to die.

The Work-Shy documents a secret network of overlooked communities that work in ways that defy work as we know it. Its poetic assemblages offer direct testimony from the first youth prison in California (the Whittier State School) and from asylums for the chronically insane (preserved in the Prinzhorn Collection in Germany and the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York City). Activating what poet Susan Howe calls “the telepathy of the archive,” these poems occupy identities rooted in the demimonde and in places of confinement; they build portraits of individuals at once denied work and subjected to its punishing routine. As “translations” of apparently unredeemable texts, the poems convert the dubious paradigms of degeneracy, solipsism, and madness into a mutable archive of infidel culture. Published under the collective, anonymous signature of the BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, this work nevertheless harbors the proper name of every voice it records. By converting the procedures of appropriation and sampling into a poetics of close listening, The Work-Shy operates at the crossroads of lyric and documentary poetries, of singularity and collectivism. An online readers companion will be available at bluntresearchgroup.site.wesleyan.edu.

Vinny's Wilderness opens with a divorced teacher returning to her home in south Belfast, where she discovers that her dearly loved, overgrown garden has been bulldozed and unceremoniously dumped in a skip outside her house. What follows are her vivid memories of the previous four months, when she tutored Denzil, a lively, personable young boy. More interested in the outdoors than engaging in the learning essential to successfully pass the 'eleven-plus' exams required to get him into second-level education, Denzil struggles against the constraints and expectations within his rigid family home. As he begins to emerge from his shell, playing with Vinny's daughter in their chaotic garden, Vinny and Denzil's mother discover a shared past, and tentatively pick up their friendship after a split during their own time working towards the eleven-plus exams. Vinny's Wilderness is a sensitive rendering of childhood friendship, tinged with nostalgia viewed through the emotional intensity of studying for your first major exam. Reminiscent of the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante, it illustrates how friendship can survive adolescence and in adulthood evolve into the support needed to change your life and become your true self.

Ancient language study is becoming an increasingly sophisticated and complex discipline, as scholars not only consider methods being used by specialists of other languages, but also absorb developments in other disciplines to facilitate their own research investigations. This interdisciplinary approach is reflected in the scope of research papers offered here, invited and peer-reviewed by the ISLP.

The articles in this number of Romantik include new research on reverie and dream as the locus of metaphor in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound; an enquiry into the Royal Swedish Society for the Publication of Manuscripts Relating to Scandinavian History and the role it played in the construction of national memory and heritage; a discussion of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s and John Martin’s iconographies of the sublime in the intersection between art and popular visual spectacle; archival discoveries related to the publication of medieval romance in early nineteenth-century Britain; and a reassessment of The Prelude as a formation narrative, arguing that William Wordsworth displays a conflicted attitude to the growth and progress usually found in the Bildungsroman. The journal also contains reviews of new books on the romantic period published in the Nordic countries.

This volume brings together the results of archaeological excavations by Pre-Construct Archaeology in advance of redevelopment, at three sites in Maidstone, Kent. Supplemented by documentary research, each of these sites epitomises a different aspect of the town’s past. The earliest evidence came from investigations at West Borough School (Site 1), to the west of the town centre, where ditches, pits and associated finds provide evidence for occupation spanning the Bronze Age to Roman periods. A remarkable and apparently unique assemblage of polished flints had been buried in a Bronze Age enclosure ditch. Post-medieval cess-pits and buildings attest to the expansion of settlement beyond the Saxon and medieval core of the town, adjacent to the River Medway, at Waterfront (Site 2). At James Whatman Way (Site 3) the structural remains of the former Maidstone Cavalry Barracks were revealed. Initially constructed in the late 18th-century, these barracks only closed in the 1990s. Amongst the finds recovered a copper-alloy General Service military button is a poignant reminder of the site’s past.

This is the first-ever study of Judeo-Urdu, that is, the Hindi/Urdu language written in Hebrew script. It provides background and an introduction to the Judeo-Urdu corpus, presents nearly two hundred entries from one text — a Hebrew-Judeo-Urdu glossary — and analyzes the orthography, phonology, and morphology of Judeo-Urdu. Comparison is made to standard Hindi and Urdu, from which Judeo-Urdu diverges in many interesting ways.

Marilynne Robinson is arguably one of the most important writers of our time. Her voice resonates across the richly imagined American landscapes within which she grounds her stories of love and loss, alienation and belonging, injustice and redemption. Robinson's award-winning body of work -- including Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award -- has cultivated admiration all over the world, offering readers new and profound interpretations of the meanings of transience, presence, convention, and resistance. In A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson, Shannon L. Mariotti and Joseph H. Lane Jr. assemble both rising and established political theorists to explore the juxtaposition of Robinson's nonfiction works and her novels, and to examine their connections to contemporary political issues. The collection analyzes Robinson's writings on American democracy, community, and freedom, and it includes an engrossing interview with the author specifically conducted for this volume. From an exploration of the democratic potential in being a "housekeeper of homelessness" to a study of models of action against racial injustice, this volume provides fascinating new insights into Robinson's work and how it reflects and reassesses American political culture and theory.