Presents a collection of critical essays about Marquez's, "One hundred years of solitude."

In a series of comparative essays on a range of texts embracing both high and popular culture from the early modern era to the contemporary period, The Ideology of Genre counters both formalists and advocates of the &"death of genre,&" arguing instead for the inevitability of genre as discursive mediation. At the same time, Beebee demonstrates that genres are inherently unstable because they are produced intertextually, by a system of differences without positive terms. In short, genre is the way texts get used. To deny that genres exist is to deny, in a sense, the possibility of reading; if genres exist, on the other hand, then they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places within and between texts where genres &"collide&" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology, and the use-value of language.

Travellers' Visions adds another perspective to ongoing debates over colonialism with an examination of the intercultural relations between France, a major colonial empire for nearly three centuries, and Japan, a country that has remained mostly autonomous throughout its existence. In this analytic history of French literary images of Japan, from soon after its reopening to the West to the present day, Kawakami examines the work of many of France's most revered authors including Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, and Roland Barthes, along with other, lesser-known writers and artists, such as Loti and Farrère, as they embarked on journeys—literary and real—to this "exotic" land. Authors are discussed according to type— journalists, diplomats, or collectors, for example—and the close readings are accompanied by Gérard Macé's beautiful and rarely seen photographs. Travellers' Visions offers new clarity to current intellectual debates and will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of French literature and Asian history alike.

Through a series of reflections from internationally renowned performance-makers and contextualising essays from leading theatre and performance scholars, this is the first book to map the influence of Roland Barthes on performance. The contributions are framed through Barthes's notion of The Neutral – the suspension of binary choice that offers a welcome antidote to the political deadlock of our present moment. They cover the breadth of Barthes's work from Mythologies (1957) to 'The Death of the Author' (1967), A Lover's Discourse (1977), Camera Lucida (1980), to the more recently available lecture courses at the Collège de France. Together, they capture and rethink a range of Barthes's preoccupations, from his early writing on myths and meaning to personal reflections on love, loss and desire, and interrogate the intersections between Barthes's work and contemporary theatre and performance. This book invites readers to approach Barthes's writing from a breadth of creative-critical perspectives, to become more aware of the importance of his late thought for thinking through a range of dramaturgical forms, and to become more familiar with the work of internationally significant performance practitioners.

A biography of the playwright speculates that he was secretly homosexual and examines his literary ambitions and austere lifestyle