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From a leading historian and writer, a delightful exploration of the great English tradition of treading the boards. The English Actor charts the uniquely English approach to stagecraft, from the medieval period to the present day. In thirty chapters, Peter Ackroyd describes, with superb narrative skill, the genesis of acting--deriving from the Church tradition of Mystery Plays--through the flourishing of the craft in the Renaissance, to modern methods following the advent of film and television. Across centuries and media, The English Actor also explores the biographies of the most notable and celebrated British actors. From the first woman actor on the English stage, Margaret Hughes, who played Desdemona in 1660; to luminaries like Laurence Olivier, Peter O'Toole, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and Helen Mirren; to contemporary multihyphenates like Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh, Sophie Okonedo, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ackroyd gives all fans of the theater an original and superbly entertaining appraisal of how actors have acted, how audiences have responded, and what we mean by the magic of the stage.

"Focusing on representations of Celtic motifs and traditions in post-1980s adult fantasy literature, this book illuminates how the historical, the mythological and the folkloric have served as inspiration for the fantastic in modern and popular culture of the western world. Bringing together both highly-acclaimed works with those that have received less critical attention, including French and Gaelic fantasy literature, Imagining the Celtic Past in Modern Fantasy explores such texts as Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Alan Garner's Weirdstone trilogy, the Irish fantasies of Jodi McIsaac, David Gemmell's Rigante novels, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison Keltiad books, as well as An Sgoil Dhubh by Iain F. MacLeòid and the Vertigen and Frontier series by Léa Silhol. Lively and covering new ground, the collection examines topics such as fairy magic, Celtic-inspired worldbuilding, heroic patterns, classical ethnography and genre tropes alongside analyses of the Celtic Tarot in speculative fiction and Celtic appropriation in fan culture. Introducing a nuanced understanding of the Celtic past, as it has been informed by recent debates in Celtic studies, this wide-ranging and provocative book shows how modern fantasy is indebted to medieval Celtic-language texts, folkloric traditions, as well as classical sources"-- Provided by publisher.

"Locating science fiction as its own distinct and increasingly important narrative form, this book explores how the genre challenges pervasive perceptions of society as presented in the conventional modern novel. Inspired by, and building upon, Georg Lukács's criticism of the orthodox novel for its depiction of life as alienating and disjointed, Milner, Murphy and Roberts posit that science fiction steps beyond this contemporary form to be a more constructive literature, better able to conceive of society as complete, integrated and well-rounded. Taking stock of 3 kinds of science fiction which lie outside the scope of the modern novel - theological or ontological science fiction, the science fiction of future history and epic science fiction - this book demonstrates science fiction's unique capacity to encapsulate the whole world, persons and events, things and objects in a glance, and address the motive behind the wish for a meaningful totality. With reference to a vast array of works by authors such as Michel Houellebecq, Elias Canetti, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Marge Piercy, Iain M. Banks, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Dirk C. Fleck, Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book offers a compelling argument for rethinking the position and potential of the science fiction novel and to challenge the way we perceive our culture"-- Provided by publisher.

Adaptation Before Cinema highlights a range of pre-cinematic media forms, including theater, novelization, painting and illustration, transmedia art, childrens media, and other literary and visual culture. The book expands the primary scholarly audience of adaptation studies from film and media scholars to literary scholars and cultural critics working across a range of historical periods, genres, forms, and media. In doing so, it underscores the creative diversity of cultural adaptation practiced before cinema came to dominate the critical conversation on adaptation. Collectively, the chapters construct critical bridges between literary history and contemporary media studies, foregrounding diverse practices of adaptation and providing a platform for innovative critical approaches to adaptation, appropriation, or transmedia storytelling popular from the Middle Ages through the invention of cinema. At the same time, they illustrate how these forms of adaptation not only influenced the cinematic adaptation industry of the twentieth century but also continue to inform adaptation practices in the twenty-first century transmedia landscape. Written by scholars with expertise in historical, literary, and cultural scholarship ranging from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, the chapters use discourses developed in contemporary adaptation studies to shed new lights on their respective historical fields, authors, and art forms

• The hero's prize : the myth of 'successful' adolescent girlhood
• Mythopoeic YA : bringing new worlds into being to conceive new ways of being
• Disrupting the myth : Alanna becomes a warrior-maiden
• Breaking the mirror : Cinder(ella) is a cyborg
• Engendering a new myth : Daine is 'of the people'
• Being-hero : relational, embodied, procreative selfhood

The heroic romance is one of the West's most enduring narratives, found everywhere, from religion and myth to blockbuster films and young adult literature. Within this story, adolescent girls are not, and cannot be, the heroes. They are, at best, the hero's bride, a prize he wins for slaying monsters. Crucially, although the girl's exclusion from heroic selfhood affects all girls, it does not do so equally-- whiteness and able-bodiedness are taken as markers of heightened, fantasy femininity. Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction explores how the young female-heroes of mythopoeic YA, a Tolkienian-inspired genre drawing on myth's world-creating power and YA's liminal potential, disrupt the conventional heroic narrative. These heroes, such as Tamora Pierce's Alanna the Lioness, Daine the Wildmage, and Marissa Meyer's Cinder and Iko, offer a model of being-hero, an embodied way of living and being in this world that disrupts the typical hero's violent hierarchy, isolating individuality, and erasure of difference. In doing so, they push the boundaries of what it means to be a hero, a girl, and even human

"This book investigates literary representations and self-representations of people with cosmopolitan identities arising from mobile global childhoods which transcend categories of migrancy and diaspora. Part I focuses on the ways in which cosmopolitan characters are represented in selected novels, from the debauched Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh's classic Brideshead Revisited, to the victimized Ila in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, to John le Carré's undefinable spies. Part II focuses on self-representations of people with a cosmopolitan upbringing, in the form of autobiographical narratives by well-known authors such as Barack Obama and Edward Said, along with lesser-known writers, all of whom "write back" to the ways in which they have at times been stereotyped and othered in literary fiction and public discourse"-- Provided by publisher

"If literature has often informed the creation of a national imaginary--a sense of common history and destiny--it has also complicated, even challenged, the unifying vision assumed in the formation of a national literature and sense of nation. National Literature in Multinational States questions the persistent association of literature and nation-states, contrasting this with the reality of multinational and ethnocultural diversity. The contributors to this collection interrogate concepts and manifestations of nationalism in the context of literary production while evaluating the place of national literatures in multinational states at a time when social unity and political agreement have never been more elusive. The volume strives for synoptic analysis via the complementary, multifaceted treatment of literary creation in several geo-cultural contexts: Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, India, and Nigeria. Contributors: Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay, Albert Braz, Matthew Cormier, Doris Hambuch, Clara Joseph, Paul D. Morris, Asma Sayed, Matthew Ťtreault, Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, Jerry White."-- Provided by publisher

• Theatrical flourishing: an introduction / Harvey Young
• Actors as surrogate sufferers: toward a model for well-being in acting training / Scott Magelssen
• The potential of pain: conflict dramaturgy and transformation in the theater / Laura A. Lodewyck
• Braver angels: performing comity in a polarized era / John Fletcher
• Beyond survival: theater of the oppressed, flourishing while fighting, and fighting to flourish / Kelly Howe
• Community musical theatre as a human flourishing project / Stacy Wolf
• Teaching theatre and Detroit history for undergraduates to flourish / Lisa L. Biggs
• Changing states: English-language theatre in Quebec / Erin Hurley
• Refusing to flourish: Jennifer Moon and Anant Shinar performing self-help / Gwyneth Shanks
• On laughter and the bonds of community / Harvey Young
• Touching theatre: practice, criticism, and aesthetics of touch in the flourishing theatrical moment / Marcia Ferguson
• Theatre, performance and community cultural development for human thriving / Stephanie Etheridge Woodson
• Theatrical flourishing: a roundtable discussion

"This collection explores the link between theatre and human flourishing. It interrogates both the social good of theatre and the personally restorative work of a range of live embodied performances. It brings together the disciplines of theatre (and performance studies) and psychology, especially positive psychology, to explore the social benefits of theatre: creating community, encouraging interconnection, serving as a mean to reveal and share both healing and trauma"-- Provided by publisher

In the middle of a cold, snowy winter, Donald Duck trades his house and four snow shovels for an airplane that has skis instead of wheels. He and the boys are going south where they won't have to shovel another snowbank. They're about to change the plane's skis for regular wheels when the Mayor asks them to fly an errand of mercy and deliver a shipment of penicillin to Point Marrow, Alaska. But before they can take off, two men slipped a small package into the plane and sent a message to Pete de Fox. As soon as they landed, Pete's men spotted the plane and searched for the package which the nephews had found and Donald had brought into the hotel. Pete intends to get that box! In a second adventure, Donald and the boys finally make it to Florida and Donald is bored. A man fishing on the pier hears him and tells him and the boys about a lost city in the Everglades. Pretty soon the four of them are in a boat, exploring. In the swamp they see a sign, "Beware of the Gneezles."

• Suburban cinema between art and genre
• Luc Besson's EuropaCorp and parkour in the suburbs
• Suburban gangsters: screen violence and the banlieues
• Suburbanoia and French banlieue horror films
• Omar Sy: Black superstardom in contemporary France
• Beyond the art/genre divide: Céline Sciamma's Girlhood
• Conclusion: Genre, inclusive casting, and the suburbs in the age of SVoD

"In the impoverished outskirts of French cities, known as the banlieues, minority communities are turning to American culture, history, and theory to make their own voices, cultures, and histories visible. Filmmakers have followed suit, turning to Hollywood genre conventions to challenge notions of identity, belonging, and marginalization in mainstream French film. French B Movies proposes that French banlieue films, far from being a fringe genre, offer a privileged site from which to understand the current state of the French film industry in an age of globalization. This gritty style appears in popular arthouse films such as Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Bande de filles (Girlhood) along with the major Netflix hit series Lupin. David Pettersen traces how, in these works and others, directors fuse features of banlieue cinema with genre formulas associated with both Hollywood and Black cultural models, as well as how transnational genre hybridizations, such as B movies, have become part of the ecosystem of the French film industry. By combining film analysis, cultural history, critical theory, and industry studies, French B Movies reveals how featuring banlieues is as much about trying to imagine new identities and production models for French cinema as it is about representation"-- Provided by publisher

"Explains how a new kind of independent production company, The Mirisch Company, remade Hollywood in the decade between the end of the studio system in the mid-50s and the emergence of the so-called "Movie Brats" (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola and Lucas) some 15 years later"-- Provided by publisher

Instapoetry is among the most popular literary phenomena of the present. In just a few years, millions of short to ultra-short lyrics have been published and shared on Instagram. In the battle for attention with countless other texts, the mechanisms of the platform and the usage routines of the users have to be served. The external pressure on literary production is immense. The book explains the production strategies and reception procedures of Instapoetry, explains its development and locates its significance - somewhere between the last stage of decay and the future of poetry. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content. Niels Penke is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of German Studies at the University of Siegen, where he was also coordinator of the Popular Cultures Research Unit from 2015 to 2018

"For observers of the European film scene, Federico Fellini's death in 1993 came to stand for the demise of Italian cinema as a whole. Exploring an eclectic sampling of works from the new millennium, Italian Film in the Present Tense confronts this narrative of decline with strong evidence to the contrary. Millicent Marcus highlights Italian cinema's new sources of industrial strength, its re-placement of the Rome-centred studio system with regional film commissions, its contemporary breakthroughs on the aesthetic front, and its vital engagement with the changing economic and socio-political circumstances in twenty-first-century Italian life. Examining works that stand out for their formal brilliance and their moral urgency, the book presents a series of fourteen case studies, featuring analyses of such renowned films as Il Divo, Gomorrah, The Great Beauty, We Have a Pope, The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, and Fire at Sea, along with lesser-known works deserving of serious critical scrutiny. In doing so, Italian Film in the Present Tense contests the widely held perception of a medium languishing in its "post-Fellini" moment, and instead acknowledges the ethical persistence and forward-looking currents of Italian cinema in the present tense."-- Provided by publisher

The adultery novel, which became a pan-European literary paradigm in the second half of the 19th century, has a fascinating back story. In the wake of the French Revolution, there emerged a slew of secular marriage legislation which produced a metaphorical surplus that is still effective today. Through legal history and canonical literary texts from Rousseau to Goethe and Manzoni to Hugo and Flaubert, "Marriage as a National Fiction" traces how marriage became a figure of reflection for the modern nation-state around 1800. At the same time, law and literature are made fruitful for historical semantics of society and community. This book is a translation of an original German 1st edition "Ehe als Nationalfiktion" by Dagmar Stoferle, published by J.B. Metzler, imprint of Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the serviceDeepL.com). The author (with the support of Chris Owain Carter) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically

Eleanor Reed, accompanying her father on an expedition to collect rare animals from Africa, falls into danger and is rescued by Tarzan

This collection explores how American science fiction television reflects, produces, and reconfigures the physical, imaginative, and cultural spaces we inhabit. It reads the proliferation of science fiction television and screen technologies as colliding heterotopias (impossible emplacements of space and time) that increasingly shape our world. With our growing awareness of population growth, the threat of ecocide, volatile geopolitics, and the rapid technological developments transforming media, we have become a space conscious age, with our lives increasingly mediated through the screen. Analyzing a plethora of science fiction television shows, the contributors explore science fictions engagement with the contested nature of inhabiting space; consider science fiction and screens as mirrors reflecting and refracting our world, its politics and conflicts; examine the nature of intersecting media and the importance of screens as science-fictional devices; and assess the transformative effects of science fiction spaces on communities and bodies

Best friends and chosen family Chris, Elise, Jo, and Alex work hard to keep themselves afloat. Their regular brunches hold them together even as the rest of their lives threaten to fall apart. In an effort to avoid being the oldest gays at the party, the crew decides to put on a new queer event called Grind-specifically for homos in their dirty thirties. Grind is a welcome distraction from their real problems: after a messy divorce, Chris adjusts to being a single parent while struggling to reconnect to their queer community. Elise is caught between feelings for her boss and the career of her dreams. Jo tries to navigate the murky boundaries of being a supportive friend and taking care of her own needs. And Alex is guarding a secret that might change his friendships forever. While navigating exes at work, physical and mental exhaustion, and drinking way, way too much on weekdays, this chosen family proves that being messy doesn't always go away with age.--Amazon

This book finds that Al-Jazeeras coverage of Bahrain and Syria has conformed with Qatar's foreign policy, throughout the last decade (2011-2021). Al-Jazeera Arabic adopted Qatar's "double standards" policy in both countries in the beginning of the Arab Spring, framing Bahrain's protests as a sectarian movement, while depicting the Syrian armed conflict as a legitimate "revolution" (2011-2013). The book observes that when ties between Qatar and Bahrain worsened during the 2017 Gulf crisis, Al-Jazeera Arabic has shifted its coverage from being "pro-Bahraini regime" to pro-protesters, focusing on violations and giving voice to activists (2014-2021). The book concludes that the lack of "Peace Journalism" framing in Al-Jazeeras coverage of Bahrain's uprising and Syria's chemical weapons attacks has represented claims as facts, and justified military action against Syria. It also reveals distinctive differences between Al-Jazeera Arabic and English, with the former lacking objective reporting standards, and using more sectarian language than the latter

"Using extensive examples of films and filmmakers from French and Japanese cinemas, this book tracks the longstanding and multiple cultural, aesthetic and stylistic links that are found in films from the two countries"-- Provided by publisher

• Alice, collapsing
• The woman who stayed silent
• High risks
• Mad genius
• Dissolving the boundries
• Run towards the danger

"Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor Sarah Polley's Run Towards the Danger explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present. These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven't told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry. Sarah Polley's work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley's life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a "reciprocal pressure dance." Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high-risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms. With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch, she had to run towards the danger. In this extraordinary book, Polley explores what it is to live in one's body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing"-- Provided by publisher

"This volume aims to offer a critical discursive-argumentative framework that will enable scholars to scrutinize the discursive construction of and, moreover, the argumentative justification for authoritarian attitudes on newspaper front pages in highly polarized times of multiple 'crises' in Greece (i.e., 'debt crisis' and 'refugee crisis'). In this sense, it aspires to outline novel research avenues that could lead scholars, working in the fields of critical discourse and argumentation studies, multimodality, and communication sciences, to move beyond studying the meaning potential of multimodal artifacts, all the while paving the way for a study of the argumentative inferences that are triggered by multimodal discourses in very polarized contexts. It frames the theoretical discussion based on notions such as Nikos Poulantzas' 'authoritarian statism' as well as Antonio Gramsci's 'hegemony' and 'intellectuals'. Methodologically, it draws on the agenda of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), synthesizing principles and tools from social semiotics and (multimodal) argumentation studies with a particular focus on inference in argumentation, for micro-level (textual) analysis"-- Provided by publisher

A revelatory look at how poet Allen Ginsberg transformed experiences of mental illness and madness into some of the most powerful and widely read poems of the twentieth century. Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem "Howl" opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness. In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother's devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them. Though madness is often linked with hardship and suffering, Ginsberg's showed how it could also lead to profound and redemptive aesthetic, spiritual, and social changes. Through his revo­lutionary poetry and social advocacy, Ginsberg dedicated himself to leading others toward new ways of being human and easing pain. Throughout his celebrated career Ginsberg made us feel as though we knew everything there was to know about him. However, much has been left out about his experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother, his visions, and his psychiatric hospitalization. In Best Minds, with a forty-year career studying and addressing trauma, Weine provides a groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process especially in relation to madness. Best Minds examines the complex relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and prophecy--using the access Ginsberg generously shared to offer new, lively, and indis­pensable insights into an American icon. Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s. In light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achieve­ments, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable

• The mystery on Leontyevsky Lane
• Behind closed doors
• The truth will out!
• The dynamic principles of performance
• Scene study through active analysis : Shakespeare
• Scene study through active analysis : Chekhov
• Rehearsing a play through active analysis : Johnson
• The system in active analysis
• Working with active analysis in the real world

"Dynamic Acting through Active Analysis is a pragmatic guide for actors to the history and practice of Stanislavsky's last and most innovative approach to performance. Named "Active Analysis" by Maria Knebel, Stanislavsky's most influential protégé, it invites actors to explore the interactive dynamics in scenes by enacting them before memorizing lines. This process of analyzing texts actively taps actors' minds, bodies and spirits simultaneously, thus fostering dynamic acting. In Part 1 of the book, the author introduces the people who sacrificed much to create and keep the technique alive during the darkest era of Soviet repression. In Part 2, actors are offered a series of lessons on the fundamentals of Active Analysis and its applications to classic and contemporary plays. Herself a Russian speaker and a world-leading expert on Active Analysis, Sharon Marie Carnicke draws on memoirs, letters, eyewitness accounts, Knebel's 6 books and other Russian language textbooks to enrich this guide. The first practical guide for today's actors in English to the history and practice of Active Analysis, this much-needed book equips the reader with the artistic flexibility needed to work across a range of dramatic styles and across media"-- Provided by publisher

A girl tries and tries again to learn to ride a bicycle and all her friends provide words of encouragement

• Foreword / by Emma Thompson
• Introduction
• Diaries 1993-2015
• Appendix: The early diaries
• Afterword / by Rima Horton

Told through his diaries--a twenty-five-year passion project--the beloved actor, political activist, and more grants us access to his thoughts and insights on theater performances, the craft of acting, politics, friendships, work projects, and his general musings on life

• Lectures and writings on madness, language, and literature. Madness and civilization ; Madness and civilization (presentation given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, April 1967) ; Madness and society ; Literature and madness (madness in Baroque theater and the Theater of Artaud) ; Literature and madness (madness in the work of Raymond Roussel) ; Phenomenological experience: experience in Bataille ; The new methods of literary analysis ; Literary analysis ; Structuralism and literary analysis (presentation given at the Club Tahar Haddad, Tunis, February 4, 1967) ; [The extralinguistic and literature] ; Literary analysis and structuralism ; Bouvard and Pécuchet: the two temptations ; The search for the absolute

"This remarkable volume brings together texts that reveal a unique perspective on Foucault's work on the interrelated topics of madness, language, and literature in the second half of the 1960s. Not only do these texts develop analyses and concepts that cannot be found anywhere else in Foucault's oeuvre, but they also show that Foucault's relation to structuralism in those years was far more complex and rich than he himself was ready to acknowledge. They show, more precisely, that between The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, and specifically in relation to madness, literature, and literary criticism, Foucault turned to structuralism not only to challenge the central role attributed to the human subject, but also to analyze language and human experience as in a way detached from the historical conditions of their emergence and production. Madness, Language, Literature is organized around three main issues: the status and place of the madman in our societies; the relationship between madness, language, and literature in Baroque theater, the theater of cruelty by Antonin Artaud, and the work of Raymond Roussel; and the evolution of literary criticism in the 1960s. A study of the "absence of a work" in Balzac and of the relationship between desire and knowledge in Flaubert completes this ensemble, presenting a side of Foucault somewhat different from the one we know from the texts he published during this time"-- Provided by publisher

• Introduction
• Restless Herd: Some Thoughts on Order / Diane Seuss
• Poems as Paintings: Life-Drawing in Words / Heather Treseler
• FAQ: from Press Authors, Graduate Students, and Editing Clients / Christopher Salerno
• The Body of the Poetry Manuscript: Patterning Your Collection with Structural Repetition / Annie Finch
• The Shapes of Books / Stephen Kampa
• Writing on the Wall: A Mystery / Alyse Knorr
• Some Assembly Required / Harvey Hix
• Leaping Between Seams: What Analog Collage Taught Me About Sequencing a Book of Poems / Karyna McGlynn
• Dreaming the Total Poem, Assembling the Counterarchive, Writing the Refuge / Philip Metres
• Dear Unexplainable / Kazim Ali
• Mystery and Legacy in Shaping a Manuscript / Cyrus Cassells
• Of Bonsais and Moons: An Epistolary on Making a Book of Poems / Victoria Chang

"Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems was conceived from a poetic dialogue on how to shed light on the art and science behind the material construction of a poetry collection, and to generate a conversation around an art form too-long hermetically obscured. This anthology of interconnected essays (craft, lyric, and critical) explores the art and technique of poetry manuscript assembly as articulated by poets in all stages of their careers. Stylistically innovative, the essays range in conception from lyrical meditations, close readings, extended metaphors (including bookshelf assembly, cooking, caring for one's mother, and bonsai trees), and an F.A.Q for writers seeking to ask the hard questions of their manuscripts, and themselves. Theorizing the poetry manuscript process through creative and aleatory means and celebrating the richness and depth of our poetic origins and legacies, this anthology, a primer in autopoiesis, is a timely, invaluable, and compact resource for creative writing teachers, as well as emerging and established poets honing their craft. Writers in other genres (fiction and non-) will also benefit from this widely applicable yet nuanced and craft-based discussion of how to bring a book into being from vital contemporary perspectives on the narrative and lyric traditions. Contributors: Diane Seuss, Heather Treseler, Christopher Salerno, Annie Finch, Stephen Kampa, Alyse Knorr, Harvey Hix, Karyna McGlynn, Philip Metres, Kazim Ali, Cyrus Cassells, and Victoria Chang"-- Provided by publisher

"Explore how the sonnet has travelled through a striking range of European and other languages and cultures, from its early modern origins to the present day"-- Provided by publisher