A series of essays presented in honor of Ross Shideler focusing on gender in contemporary Nordic literature.

This copiously annotated bibliography documents and examines the whole range of commentary on Strindberg's works and activity in many fields besides the plays for which he is internationally best known. These include his prose fiction and poetry, his work as an historian and natural historian, and his relationship to the other arts, most notably his painting. It is concerned with both lasting works of literary and dramatic criticism, as well as reviews of his books and plays in the theatre, and some more ephemeral material, all of this in several languages. Organised generically and by subject and individual work, the bibliography enables the reader to trace the changing impact of Strindberg and his works in various countries and during different periods. It is thus very much a study in reception as well as a bibliographical record of published material. It traces the developing image of Strindberg and his writing both during his lifetime and in subsequent years, and with frequent cross reference offers a comprehensive overview of a literary and existential project that has rarely been matched for its multifaceted diversity. The bibliography is published in three parts. Volume 2, The Plays (978-0-947623-82-1) and Volume 3, Prose, Poetry, Miscellaneous (978-0-947623-83-8) are also now available. Michael Robinson is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Scandinavian Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.

Essays focusing on the artistic innovations of Scandinavian fin de siècles. This collection of essays by eminent Scandinavists focusses on works and artistic movements prominent towards the ends of the last four centuries. The last decade of each century has seen amazing innovations in Scandinavian arts, especially in literature: the flowering of genres in national languages in the 1600s, the bawdy rococo voice of Carl Michael Bellman in the 1700s, the rise of Scandinavian drama with August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen and the neoromanticism of the premodernistic novels of Hamsun. Each essay is a study from the unique perspective of one of the field's foremost European or American scholars and is inspired by the Renaissance interests of the Norwegian scholar Harlad S. Naess. The collection as a whole contributes to the creation of a modern, multilayered view of the beginnings and endings of the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century worlds in Scandinavia and Scandinavian America.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Patriarchalism is omnipresent in Western culture and it pervades the texts that have shaped this culture. From the creation story in the Bible to the ancient authors, from the Church fathers to the treatises of Enlightenment philosophers, right up to modern fiction, male authority over women, children and other dependents has shaped the nature of human relationships and the discourses about these relationships. This collection of short essays offers fresh and novel readings of key texts in the history of patriarchalism as a concept of power. The texts selected are from political, religious and literary works and together the readings add new insights to a tradition that has never gone uncontested, yet is unlikely to disappear soon.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory offers a concise, comprehensive and accessible introduction to the themes central to the thought of one of the world's most provocative and original theorists. The book concentrates on Spivak's engagement, in theory and practice, with deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and issues of postcoloniality and globalization, and makes clear the extent of her impact in the fields of postcolonial and literary theory. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory is a key resource for anyone studying this pioneering thinker.

Theater’s materiality and reliance on human actors has traditionally put it at odds with modernist principles of aesthetic autonomy and depersonalization. Spectral Characters argues that modern dramatists in fact emphasized the extent to which humans are fictional, made and changed by costumes, settings, props, and spoken dialogue. Examining work by Ibsen, Wilde, Strindberg, Genet, Kopit, and Beckett, the book takes up the apparent deadness of characters whose selves are made of other people, whose thoughts become exteriorized communication technologies, and whose bodies merge with walls and furniture. The ghostly, vampiric, and telepathic qualities of these characters, Sarah Balkin argues, mark a new relationship between the material and the imaginary in modern theater. By considering characters whose bodies respond to language, whose attempts to realize their individuality collapse into inanimacy, and who sometimes don’t appear at all, the book posits a new genealogy of modernist drama that emphasizes its continuities with nineteenth-century melodrama and realism.

This volume is a critical exploration of multiple posthuman possibilities in the 21st century and beyond. Due to the global engagement with advanced technology, we are witness to a species-wise blurring of boundaries at the edge of the human. On the one hand, we find ourselves in a digital age in which human identity is being transformed through networked technological intervention, a large part of our consciousness transferred to "smart" external devices. On the other hand, we are assisted---or assailed---by an unprecedented proliferation of quasi-human substitutes and surrogates, forming a spectrum of humanoids with fuzzy borders. Under these conditions, critical posthumanism asks, who will occupy and control our planet: Will the "superhuman" merely serve as another sign under which new regimes of dominance are spread across the earth? Or can we discover or invent technologies of existence to counter such dominance? It is issues such as these which are at the heart of this new volume of explorations of the posthuman. The essays in this volume offer leading-edge thought on the subject, with special emphases on postmodern and postcolonial futures. They engage with questions of subalternity and feminism vis-à-vis posthumanism, dealing with issues of subjugation, dispensability and surrogacy, as well as the possibilities of resistance, ethical politics or subjective transformation from South Asian archives of cultural and spiritual practice. This volume is a valuable addition to the on-going global dialogues on posthumanism, indispensable to those, from across several disciplines, who are interested in postcolonial and planetary futures.