Sodomscapes presents a fresh approach to the story of Lot’s wife, as it’s been read across cultures and generations. In the process, it reinterprets foundational concepts of ethics, representation, and the body. While the sudden mutation of Lot’s wife in the flight from Sodom is often read to confirm our antiscopic bias, a rival tradition emphasizes the counterintuitive optics required to nurture sustainable habitations for life in view of its unforeseeable contingency. Whether in medieval exegesis, Russian avant-garde art, Renaissance painting, or today’s Dead Sea health care tourism industry, the repeated desire to reclaim Lot’s wife turns the cautionary emblem of the mutating woman into a figural laboratory for testing the ethical bounds of hospitality. Sodomscape—the book’s name for this gesture—revisits touchstone moments in the history of figural thinking and places them in conversation with key thinkers of hospitality. The book’s cumulative perspective identifies Lot’s wife as the resilient figure of vigilant dwelling, whose in-betweenness discloses counterintuitive ways of understanding what counts as a life amid divergent claims of being-with and being-for.

The Still Performance examines the poetry of five postmodern American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashberry, Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, and Charles Wright. McCorkle devotes a chapter to each one of these five poets and provides an extensive overview of their poetics. The author concludes that postmodern poetry, and these poets in particular, are engaged in various but overlapping reappraisals of modernism. More importantly, he asserts the necessity of critical inquiry bound to the persistent act of self-examination.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Beckett and nothing invites its readership to understand the complex ways in which the Beckett canon both suggests and resists turning nothing into something by looking at specific, sometimes almost invisible ways in which ‘little nothings’ pervade the Beckett canon. The volume has two main functions: on the one hand, it looks at ‘nothing’ not only as a content but also a set of rhetorical strategies to reconsider afresh classic Beckett problems such as Irishness, silence, value, marginality, politics and the relationships between modernism and postmodernism and absence and presence. On the other, it focuses on ‘nothing’ in order to assess how the Beckett oeuvre can help us rethink contemporary preoccupations with materialism, neurology, sculpture, music and television. The volume is a scholarly intervention in the fields of Beckett studies which offers its chapters as case studies to use in the classroom. It will prove of interest to advanced students and scholars in English, French, Comparative Literature, Drama, Visual Studies, Philosophy, Music, Cinema and TV studies.

“To you, I devote my love in its entirety.” The contract between a human and a god reaches its conclusion in this finale volume of A Pale Moon Reverie! Fine wine, music, and warmth. These are the three sacred offerings the pleasure town of Irede dedicates to its god. Since time immemorial, Irede has remained free of the fires of international conflict, indifferent to the changing of other nations’ borders. Yet the clouds of war are now drifting across the entire continent, threatening to leave none untouched. In this town of brilliance and color, where powers clash, each to their own motive, Xixu fights in the shadows to protect Sari and her beloved home. Meanwhile, Sari firms her resolve: she will choose her guest—the only one she will take in her lifetime. Predestined fate stands in our protagonists’ way, demanding to be overturned. What will be the conclusion to this tale of myth and humanity?

"A Liz Pelletier collection book"--P. [4] of cover.