Published serially between 1928 and 1931, Shanghai tells the story of a group of Japanese expatriates living in the International Settlement at the time of the May 30th Incident of 1925. The personal lives and desires of the main characters play out against a historical backdrop of labor unrest, factional intrigue, colonialist ambitions, and racial politics.

The author, Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947), was an essayist, writer, and critical theorist who became one of the most powerful and influential literary figures in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. He looked to contemporary avant-garde movements in Europe -- Dadaism, futurism, surrealism, expressionism -- for inspiration in his effort to explode the conventions of literary language and to break free of what he saw as the prisonhouse of modern culture.

Yokomitsu incorporated striking visuality into a realistic mode that presents a disturbing picture of a city in turmoil. The result is a brilliant evocation of Shanghai as a gritty ideological battleground and as an exotic landscape where dreams of sexual and economic domination are nurtured.

In this ground-breaking work, Bridget Orr shows that popular eighteenth-century theatre was about much more than fashion, manners and party politics. Using the theatre as a means of circulating and publicizing radical Enlightenment ideas, many plays made passionate arguments for religious and cultural toleration, and voiced protests against imperial invasion and forced conversion of indigenous peoples by colonial Europeans. Irish and labouring-class dramatists wrote plays, often set in the countryside, attacking social and political hierarchy in Britain itself. Another crucial but as yet unexplored aspect of early eighteenth-century theatre is its connection to freemasonry. Freemasons were pervasive as actors, managers, prompters, scene-painters, dancers and musicians, with their own lodges, benefit performances and particular audiences. In addition to promoting the Enlightened agenda of toleration and cosmopolitanism, freemason dramatists invented the new genre of domestic tragedy, a genre that criticized the effects of commercial and colonial capitalism.

Lala Lajpat Rai was one of the outstanding leaders of modern India, a contemporary of Dadabhai Naroji, Tilak, Gokhale and Gandhi. His public life spanned the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. He practiced law at the Lahore Chief Court and built up a lucrative practice, but was drawn very early into public activities pertaining to religious, educational and social reforms and then into nationalist politics. Lajpat Rai was one of the foremost leaders of the Indian National Congress. His arrest and deportation without trial to Burma in 1907 created a great sensation in India. He spent the war years (1914-18) in the United States propagating the Indian case for self- government. He returned to India in 1920 and had the honour of presiding over the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress which approved of Gandhis campaign for non-cooperation with the government. He was deputy leader of the Swaraj Party in the Legislative Assembly and played a prominent role in provincial as well as national politics in the 1920s. While leading a demonstration against the Simmon Commision at Lahore in 1928 he received injuries in an assault by the police which hastened his death. The fourth volume in the series of The Collected Works of Lala Lajpat Rai covers five years, from April 1909 to May 1914. They were lean years for the Indian National Congress. The moderate leaders had hoped that with the expulsion of the Extremists from the Congress at the Surat Congress in 1907, the unity and vitality of the party would be restored. But, as Lajpat Rai had warned, while the Extremists has been well-nigh crushed, their exclusion from the Congress weakened rather than strengthened the party. Lajpat Rai shared the disappointment of other Congress leaders with the Reforms Act of 1909 which had introduced separate electorates. He was seriously concerned at the widening gulf between Hindus and Muslims in the wake of the reforms. This is evident from the comprehensive and closely reasoned article he wrote in the Urdu journal Zamana, reproduced in this volume. Not only did the Reforms Act of 1909 fall short of the expectations of the Congress leaders, the attitude of the British bureaucracy in India towards political activities hardened; one of Lajpat Rais main theme in his lectures and articles during his visit to England in 1910 was the suppression of civil liberties in India. Even though politics were Lajpat Rais central preoccupation, he did not forget his commitment to social and educational reforms. He denounced untouchability and spoke and wrote extensively on education.

Shakespeare and Gender guides students, educators, practitioners and researchers through the complexities of the representation of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's work. Informed by contemporary and early modern debates and insights into gender and sexuality, including intersectionality, feminist geography, queer and performance studies and fourth-wave feminism, this book provides a lucid and lively discussion of how gender and sexual identity are debated, contested and displayed in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Using close textual analysis hand-in- hand with diverse contextual materials, the book offers an accessible and intelligent introduction to how gender debates are integral to the plays and poems, and why we continue to read and perform them with this in mind. Topics and themes discussed include gendering madness, paternity and the patriarchy, sexuality, anxious masculinity, maternal bodies, gender transgression, and kingship and the male body politic.

"Ancient Greek dance" traditionally evokes images of stately choruses or lively Dionysiac revels - communal acts of performance. This is the first book to look beyond the chorus to the diverse and complex representation of solo dancers in Archaic and Classical Greek literature. It argues that dancing alone signifies transgression and vulnerability in the Greek cultural imagination, as isolation from the chorus marks the separation of the individual from a range of communal social structures. It also demonstrates that the solo dancer is a powerful figure for literary exploration and experimentation, highlighting the importance of the singular dancing body in the articulation of poetic, narrative, and generic interests across Greek literature. Taking a comparative approach and engaging with current work in dance and performance studies, this book reveals the profound literary and cultural importance of the unruly solo dancer in the ancient Greek world.

"Like all mothers, mine had a set of maxims that she thought were important to impart to me: if you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all (unless it's irresistibly funny); it's as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is with a poor man (a nice idea in theory); if you want to commit suicide, wait until tomorrow (advice which has, it turns out, saved my life)."

Like many daughters of elderly parents, Pat MacEnulty finds herself in a maze of healthcare negotiations and discoveries when her mother can no longer care for herself. Pat's mother, who stood by her through her darkest years as a drug addict, was a small-town icon as a composer, pianist, organist, and musical director. She is suddenly unable to be the accomplished, independent person she once was. Now Pat has two goals: to help her daughter avoid the mistakes that derailed her own life, and to see her mother's masterpiece, "An American Requiem," find a new life and a new audience in her mother's lifetime. Along the way, Pat rediscovers her own strength, humor, and rebelliousness at the most unlikely moments.

Pat MacEnulty is the author of four novels, including "Sweet Fire," and a collection of short stories. She is also a teacher, workshop leader, writing coach, and freelance editor. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Bonnie Jo Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

The complete guide to the world of poetry -- from sonnets to spoken word!

Poetry For Dummies will help you understand, appreciate, and write poetry. This book is filled with hands-on exercises to get your creative juices flowing and smart tips on getting your poems published.

Now part of American film and literary lore, Tom Ripley, "a bisexual psychopath and art forger who murders without remorse when his comforts are threatened" (New York Times Book Review), was Patricia Highsmith's favorite creation. In The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), Highsmith explores Ripley's bizarrely paternal relationship with a troubled young runaway, whose abduction draws them into Berlin's seamy underworld. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides "a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior" (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).

Living on his posh French estate with his elegant heiress wife, Tom Ripley, on the cusp of middle age, is no longer the striving comer of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Having accrued considerable wealth through a long career of crime forgery, extortion, serial murder Ripley still finds his appetite unquenched and longs to get back in the game. In Ripley's Game, first published in 1974, Patricia Highsmith's classic chameleon relishes the opportunity to simultaneously repay an insult and help a friend commit a crime and escape the doldrums of his idyllic retirement. This third novel in Highsmith's series is one of her most psychologically nuanced particularly memorable for its dark, absurd humor and was hailed by critics for its ability to manipulate the tropes of the genre. With the creation of Ripley, one of literature's most seductive sociopaths, Highsmith anticipated the likes of Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter years before their appearance."

Merry Christmas, everyone!

“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”

With those famous words unfolds a tale that renews the joy and caring that are Christmas. Whether we read it aloud with our family and friends or open the pages on a chill winter evening to savor the story in solitude, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a very special holiday experience.

It is the one book that every year will warm our hearts with favorite memories of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future — and will remind us with laughter and tears that the true Christmas spirit comes from giving with love.

With a heartwarming account of Dickens’s first reading of the Carol, and a biographical sketch.

It is only in fairly recent times that Arab writers have turned their hands to the theater. This collection of nineteen short plays gives a valuable insight into a fast-changing and increasingly distinctive area of modern Arabic literature.

Compiled and edited by Lance Banning (Professor of History, University of Kentucky), Liberty And Order: The First American Party Struggle presents representatives of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist factions expounding in their own words their divergent philosophies, visions, and concerns -- differences that would give birth to a system of American political parties which was originally unexpected and unforeseen by the Founding Fathers and the United States Constitution. Liberty And Order provides significant insights and backgrounding into such historical issues as the development of the Bill of Rights; the impact of the French Revolution and the War of 1812 upon American civil liberties and foreign policy; and the primal foundations of what we recognize today as the American political economy. Liberty And Order is a seminal contribution to school and community library American Political History collections.

Extraordinary Bodies is a cornerstone text of disability studies, establishing the field upon its publication in 1997. Framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, the book added depth to oppressive narratives and revealed novel, liberatory ones. Through her incisive readings of such texts as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson exposed the social forces driving representations of disability. She encouraged new ways of looking at texts and their depiction of the body and stretched the limits of what counted as a text, considering freak shows and other pop culture artifacts as reflections of community rites and fears. Garland-Thomson also elevated the status of African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Extraordinary Bodies laid the groundwork for an appreciation of disability culture and an inclusive new approach to the study of social marginalization.