Bøker utgitt av Bloomsbury Academic

Throughout his career, Derek Walcott turned to the literature and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. His book-length poem recasting the epics of Homer, Virgil and Dante in St Lucia is best-known in this regard, yet Omeros is only the pinnacle of a lengthy and lively dialogue that Walcott developed between the ancient Mediterranean and the modern Caribbean. Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean explores how, in developing that discourse between ancient and modern, between Europe and the Caribbean, Walcott refuted the suggestion that to engage with literature from elsewhere was to lack originality; instead, he asserted a place for Caribbean art in a global, transhistorical canon. Drawing on Walcott's own theoretical concerns, this book explores his engagement with Graeco-Roman antiquity from three key perspectives. Firstly, that a perception of time as linear must be coupled with an understanding of it as simultaneous, thereby doing away with the oppressive power of history and confirming the 'New World' on a par with the 'Old'. Secondly, that syncretism lies at the heart of Caribbean life and art, with influences from Africa, Asia, and Europe constituting key parts of Caribbean identity alongside its indigenous cultures. Thirdly, that Caribbean literature creates the world anew without erasing the past. With these three postcolonial conceptions at the heart of his engagement with ancient Greece and Rome, Walcott revealed the reasons why classical reception has been a rich facet of Caribbean artistry.

Ovid's Metamorphoses offers a compelling site for reconsidering the category of the human within the complex ecologies that make up the world as we know it. The poem's recurrent theme is the physical transformation of humans into other life forms, a theme that invites readers to consider how human and non-human agencies have evolved from and adapted to one another in a relationship characterized by fluctuating perceptions of friction and symbiosis, distance and proximity. This volume of essays traces the variety of ways in which the world of the Metamorphoses offers a set of structures for modelling the relationship between humans and other agencies within the biosphere in ways that answer to many of the precepts of contemporary eco-criticism. The contributors make the case for seeing the worldview depicted in this ancient text as an exemplar of the 'premodern' ecological mindset that contemporary environmental thought seeks to approximate in many ways. Their papers also scrutinize a number of critical moments in the history of the text's ecological reception (including reflections by a contemporary poet, as well as studies of important Medieval and Renaissance receptions of Ovid) in an attempt to recuperate the Metamorphoses as a foundational text in the history of environmental thought.

Examining the theme of child sacrifice as a psychological challenge, this book applies a unique approach to religious ideas by looking at beliefs and practices that are considered deviant, but also make up part of mainstream religious discourse in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Ancient religious mythology, which survives through living traditions and transmitted narratives, rituals, and writings, is filled with violent stories, often involving the targeting of children as ritual victims. Christianity offers Abraham's sacrifice and assures us that the "only begotten son" has died, and then been resurrected. This version of the sacrifice myth has dominated the West. It is celebrated in an act of fantasy cannibalism, in which the believers share the divine son's flesh and blood. This book makes the connection between Satanism stories in the 1980s, the Blood Libel in Europe, The Eucharist, and Eastern Mediterranean narratives of child sacrifice.

"He said, 'The day will come when they don't cut our heads off in front of people.' And I asked him, 'Why?' And he said, 'Because we'll cut them off ourselves.'" A lecturer in Chile. A study group in the USA. A guard in the desert. A hangman in Mexico. A woman who won't stop dancing in Peru. Pablo Manzi's darkly comic odyssey across the Americas explores whether violence brings us closer together and what it takes to make a community. A Fight Against... marks the English-language debut of one of Chile's most significant new voices. It was developed on a residency at the Royal Court Theatre, London, where it premiered in December 2021 in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

Between 1968 and 1975, there was a subtle thawing of relations between East and West, for which Brezhnev coined the name Détente, and - perhaps - a chance to end the Cold War. The leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, hoped to forge a new relationship between East and West. Yet, the greatest changes of the era took place outside the sphere of international diplomacy. The 1960s brought social collision across the world, from the anti-war protests in America to the student demonstrations on the streets of Paris, and Mao Tsetung's Red Guards in China. A new generation, whom advertising executives dubbed the baby-boomers, brought new attitudes to towards sex, gender, race, the environment and religion. In this book, Richard Crowder explores the years of Détente, and introduces us to the key players of the era, whose stories form the narrative of this book.