Emerging concerns and contexts of geological thinking seek to bring out how energopolitical interventions into the geokinetic "unfolding" of the Earth assume new dimensions and directions, owing to the complex and evolving intersections between "folds" and "fluxes" of energy in the context of oceans. Written in negotiation with the notion of energopolitics articulated by Dominic Boyer, Remapping Energopolitics calls for ruling out any epistemic attempt to structure the rhizomatic movements of energy through the transformations of oceans. Aiming to delve deeper into the complex junctures among energy, ocean and earth(ing), epistemic ends of Blue Humanities are reworked with the help of geophilosophical reading of some Sri Lankan minor writings and in doing so, Remapping Energopolitics makes a series of attempts to reconceptualize "energy thinking" in line with the differential and deterritorial grammatology of Deleuzo-Guattarian micropolitics, thereby offering a critique of the structured and stratified understandings of "energy linkages".

Cartographies of Postcolonial Vegetal Politics takes a deep dive into the stratified and rigidly segmented territorialities of Plant Humanities or Critical Plant Studies. It strikes up an epistemic departure from the arboreal structures of “plant-thinking” and subsequently lays out “plant-becoming” in terms of ontophytological thinking revised in alignment with rhizomatics so as to critically design the discursive edifices of postcolonial vegetal politics—the differential grammatology of which stands wedded to the production of the “new” and thus is understood to be able to position vegetality as event-in-(dis)order. Abhisek Ghosal emphasizes the profound importance of Deleuzo-Guattarian grammatologies in pulling up “plant-becoming” from being subjected to a set of rigidly structured models of vegetality. It is by working out aleatory eventualities of postcolonial haecceities, that the rigid “structures” of vegetality constituting the intellectual terrain of Critical Plant Studies are tenably discarded to foreground “n-1” becomings of vegetality—the multiplicities of which can well be sensed by means of reckoning vegetality as deterritorial vector that can facilitate scholars to map the eventual unfolding of postcolonial vegetal politics afresh.

This book considers the contemporary political formula of the “Chinese Dream” in the light of the treatment of dreams in Chinese literary history since antiquity. Sinic literary and philosophical texts document an extensive spectrum of dream possibilities: starting with Zhuangzi’s eminent butterfly dream, an early example of the inversion of the dreamer’s reality, through to confusing visions of the spiritual realm. In classical dramas, novels, and ghost stories, dreams see the earthly realm enter into conflict with higher realms of existence. They indulge the dreamer’s quest for sensual pleasures, but then spiritual beings relentlessly harvest the dreamers’ life energy. Dreams promise spiritual enlightenment – only to abandon the dreamer in a state of utter confusion. In the early twentieth century, traditional dream knowledge is abandoned in favour or Freudian episodes of sexual repression. In this context, the collective national dream emerges as an unexpected vehicle of the pained individual’s hope for national rejuvenation.

The first comprehensive review of all extant "Italian" chronicles set in the Philippine Islands, this book juxtaposes "Filipino" Otherness with the unique condition of "Italian" ambivalence and alterity within Europe. This book's contribution to the critical studies of travel is the opening of an analytical middle ground, highlighting the ambivalence of Italian chroniclers while acknowledging their participation in epistemological practices subsumed within the broader enterprise of conquest. Beyond the role of travel writing in colonial episteme, the book also situates the act of writing about one’s travels in instances of national character building (in Italy’s case) and in attempts of constructing a national historiography (in the Philippines' case). This manner of nuancing literary productions by the West while navigating its implications in the East, specifically, how pre-Unification “Italian” travel informed nationalist constructions in the Revolutionary Philippines, could enrich our understanding of and refract monolithic conceptions of metropole−periphery relations.

Feelings of rootlessness, fragmentation and loneliness are endemic in today’s secular societies. In the late nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim described this kind of social malaise as anomie, a concept which this book locates within a historical narrative of the emergence of Modernism from Modernity. The book focuses on two representative figures, Benedictus de Spinoza and Vincent van Gogh, on whose work it offers some significant new perspectives. Spinoza drew up a blueprint for Modernity, which is to say, the cultural transformations that took place as a result of the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation. In counterpoint to his overriding confidence in reason, a persistent current in Spinoza’s writing shows how concerned he was about a possible loss of confidence in his governing idea of a single Substance, the philosophical God with which he sought to replace the creator God of the Bible. In promoting art as a means of filling the gap left by the absence of Spinoza’s philosophical God and the failures of traditional Christianity, Van Gogh also discovered the limitations of the vocation to which he had dedicated himself. He concluded that, in the tension between art and anomie, a new kind of religious sensibility and understanding might emerge. This remains the case in the current postmodern cultural phase when fragmentation and incoherence are summoning up new assessments and re-configurations of values promoting new forms of solidarity, dialogue and religious understanding.

This volume traces the growth of Tennessee Williams from being a fragile child to becoming one of America’s greatest playwrights, also highlighting the playwright’s deep indebtedness to the Southern literary conventions. The book analyses Williams’s wonderful play with the sense of time and shows how in The Glass Menagerie as in all memory plays, the protagonist ruminates over the past, re-evaluates himself in that context and has a deeper understanding of the present, eventually using memory to recover from past trauma. One of the chapters analyses the use of the new form in Menagerie that Williams and his contemporaries had begun experimenting with, what Williams referred to as ‘plastic theatre’. Twentieth century American poetic drama, turned out to be contemporary, seeking the universal emotional and psychic truths and simultaneously portraying American life and culture with authenticity. The book also involves an in-depth study of the characters in Menagerie. Tom Wingfield has been critiqued in relationship to the absent father, the formidable mother and the soulmate sister; and the author has focused on, amongst many things, the gender issue. She has provided an analysis and critique of the reproduction of sex and gender and has brought the reader’s attention to Tom Wingfield’s and the playwright’s own struggle to strike a balance between the masculine and the feminine.

This book explores J. R. R. Tolkien’s unique and warm relationship to the Kalevala, a poem usually hailed as the Finnish and Karelian national epic, compiled, edited and partly revisioned from older folk poetry by Finnish scholar Elias Lönnrot in the 19th century. J. R. R. Tolkien, an Oxford academic and the greatest author of the 20th-century fantasy, creator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was fascinated from early on by the Kalevala. Tolkien himself described the Kalevala as “a germ” of his fantasy fiction.