Ianto is a sheepshagger, a Welsh redneck, and he is out to take revenge on the English yuppies who own his grandmother's cottage and everyone else who has violated his land.

The great Calculor of Libris was forced to watch as Overmayor Zarvora had four of its components lined up against a wall and shot for negligence. Thereafter, its calculations were free from errors, and that was just as well-for only this strangest of calculating machines and its two thousand enslaved components could save the world from a new ice age. And all the while a faint mirrorsun hangs in the night sky, warning of the cold to come. In Sean McMullen's glittering, dynamic, and exotic world two millennia from now, there is no more electricity, wind engines are leading-edge technology, librarians fight duels to settle disputes, steam power is banned by every major religion, and a mysterious siren "Call" lures people to their death. Nevertheless, the brilliant and ruthless Zarvora intends to start a war in space against inconceivably ancient nuclear battle stations. Unbeknownst to Zarvora, however, the greatest threat to humanity is neither a machine nor a force but her demented and implacable enemy Lemorel, who has resurrected an obscene and evil concept from the distant past: Total War. Souls in the Great Machine is the first volume of Sean McMullen's brilliant future history of the world of Greatwinter

In the late 1990s, a group of young drifters find themselves washed up in a small town on the west coast of Wales. Here they explore and attempt to overcome the yearnings and addictions which have brought them to this place: promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, petty crime, the intense and angry search for the meaning which they feel life lacks.

Metalanguage brings together new, original contributions on people's knowledge about language and representations of language, e.g., representations of dialects, styles, utterances, stances and goals in relation to sociolinguistic theory, sociolinguistic accounts of language variation, and accounts of linguistic usage. Drawing on a variety of data sources such as lay and linguists' metalanguage, the media, parliamentary debates, education, and retail shopping, the book comprises four sections and an integrative commentary. The main thematic parts deal with metalanguage in relation to the following issues: the theory of metalanguage, ideology, social evaluation, and stylisation. Other key themes discussed include constructionism, identity formation, in- and out-grouping, deception, discrimination, manipulation, and the increasing semiotisation of the socio-cultural landscape. Apart from the strictly linguistic concerns, some contributions focus on discourse in a broader sense examining meta-commentary construed in modalities other than language. The book follows from and complements a great tradition of the study of metalanguage, reflexivity, and metapragmatics, and offers a new, integrating perspective from various fields of sociolinguistics: perceptual dialectology, variationism, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, and social semiotics. The broad range of theoretical issues and accessible style of writing will appeal to advanced students and researchers in sociolinguistics and in other disciplines across the social sciences and humanities including linguists, communication researchers, anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, critical and social theorists. The book includes chapters by Deborah Cameron, Nikolas Coupland, Dariusz Galasinski, Peter Garrett, Adam Jaworski, Tore Kristiansen, Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, Dennis Preston, Theo van Leeuwen, Kay Richardson, Itesh Sachdev, Angie Williams, and John Wilson.

"White trash" is a liminal figure that dramatizes the intersection of race and class. Contemporary British novelists like Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths and John King use this originally US-American stereotype to interrogate the racializing discourse of class in British society. Their novels are interdiscursive reflections of the figurations of race and class that still haunt the British cultural imaginary. "British White Trash" is the first analysis to comprehensively examine the adaptation of the "white trash" stereotype in major British novels. The study thus contributes to a critical understanding of racism and classism, its cultural representations and its underlying social processes.

The essays in this volume focus on the text-world dichotomy that has been a pivotal problem since Plato, implicating notions of mimesis and representation and raising a series of debatable issues. Do literary texts relate only to the fictional world and not to the real one? Do they not only describe but also perform and thus create and transform reality? Is literature a mere reflection/expression of society, a field and a tool of political manipulations, a playground to exercise ideological and social power? Herbert Grabes’ seminal essay “Literature in Society/Society and Its Literature”, which opens this volume, perfectly captures the essential functions of literature in society, whether it be Derridean belief in a revolutionary potential of literature, “the power of literature to say everything”, or Hillis Miller’s view of literature having the potential to create or reveal alternative realities; or, according to Grabes, the ability of literature “to offer to society a possibility of self-reflection by way of presenting a double of what is held to be reality”; and, last but not least, the ability of literature “to considerably contribute to the joy of life by enabling a particular kind of pleasure” – the pleasure of reading literature. The subsequent essays collected in this volume deal with complex relations between Literature and Society, approaching this issue from different angles and in various historical epochs. They are on diverse thematics and written from diverse theoretical perspectives, differing in scope and methodology.