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Anne Wynter, a governess with some dark secrets in her past, is tempted by the dangerously handsome Daniel Smythe-Smith, Earl of Winstead, who relentlessly pursues her despite her social station.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” begins one chapter of critically acclaimed Lee Siegel’s new novel, Love and the Incredibly Old Man. “In the beginning” starts another. What else can a novelist do when hired as a ghostwriter by an elderly, irascible, conquistador-costumed man claiming to be the 540-year-old Juan Ponce de León? The fantastic life of that legendary explorer—inventor of rum, cigars, Coca-Cola, and popcorn—is the frame for Siegel’s fourth chronicle of love, lies, luck, loss, and labia. Summoned with cold hard cash and a pinch of flattery, a professor and novelist named Lee Siegel finds himself in Eagle Springs, Florida, attempting to give form to the life of the man who, contrary to popular and historical opinion, did indeed find the Fountain of Youth. Spending humid days listening to the romantic ramblings of the old man and sleepless nights doubting yet trying to craft these reminiscences into a narrative that will satisfy the literary aspirations of his subject, Siegel the ghostwriter spins an improbable tale filled with Native Americans, insatiable monarchs, philandering cantors, deliriously passionate nuns, delicate actresses, androgynous artists, and deceptions small and large. For de León, and for Siegel too, centuries of conquest and colonialism, fortune and identity, are all refracted through the memories of the conquistador’s lovers, each and every one of them adored “more than any other woman ever.” Comic, melancholic, lusty, and fully engaged with the act of invention, whether in love or on the page, Love and the Incredibly Old Man continues the real Lee Siegel’s exuberant exploration of that sentiment which Ponce de León confesses has “transported me to the most joyous heights, plunged me to the most dismal depths, and dropped me willy-nilly and dumbfounded at all places in between.”

Tarkovsky’s Solaris converts Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction into a tragic drama: not only a problem of conscience, but also a dilemma of action. If there is a dramatic antihero, Kris Kelvin, there is also a tragic heroine, Hary, both antagonistic and complementary forms of the same conscience. Some effects of such hypothesis unfold, in successive order of the experience of strangeness: the dread, the seduction, the familiarity in the relationship with the double. However, there is a higher degree in the fantastic character of this drama: the autonomy of the duplicate woman, her discourse as well as her decision in the outcome, attitudes which allow for a feminist interpretation of the film. Hary’s speech represents a critique of the historical and existential condition of woman, and Hary, on the other hand, embodies an inauthentic subjectivity according to Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking.

Despite much scholarship on lou andreas-Salomé—her person, her friendships, her philosophical and psychological theories, and her fiction—, her second novel Ruth (1895) has received little critical attention even though it is of foundational importance for her later fiction. This article examines the charismatic character of Ruth, an orphan, in relation to her male tutor and guardian. This predatory pedagogue and self-styled advocate of women’s emancipation seeks to dominate and seduce her as she in turn seeks to overcome her fears of abuse and abandonment. Her needs and fears link back to her early childhood, parallel to Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) and lecture on the “Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896) on childhood sexual trauma, introducing his so-called “seduction theory.” These texts may have influenced Andreas-Salomé’s writing of Ruth around the same time, long before she became herself a psychoanalyst and friend of Freud. the character of ruth develops in relation to male Gewalt (physical, sexual or rhetorical) in a patriarchal society.

Reading Rapeexamines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations. Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and \"realist\" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels toDeliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues. Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism,Reading Rapealso challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts. This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity.

The uncertain modes of production in a colonially disturbed society result into toxic anxieties, far-reaching frustrations, and consequential transgressions. Irrespective of local cultural values, the western imperialism has cultivated its ends by politically prioritizing the western modes of production as the avant-garde alternatives for the people of traditional economic conditions. It is also through a high-yielding relationship between seduction and appropriation that the imperial powers make the modern market inevitable and indispensable for the subjugated public at large. Correspondingly, the neophytes-the subjects of modern markets-too accept the contractually transfiguring enterprises publicized through newly established discursive practices. This metamorphosing but a culturally vital process has been intimated by an Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in his novel Midaq Alley published in 1947. The characters of this novel experience certain paradoxes of appropriation and transfiguration for the colonially syllabized market fetishes. Above all, the metaphor of crippling in this fiction signifies the repercussions of (atrophying) modernity in Cairo. The research, therefore, critically evaluates the intersubjective modes of production in Midaq Alley which (tend to) cripple and appropriate the masses in accordance with the norms of modernity in market.

[...]she makes frequent intertextual references to the literary canon of the fin-de-siecle and the early-twentieth century, invoking the works of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, to name just a few.2 Her comics, infused with intertextual references to Remembrance, allow for the structuring of queer subjects and representations of denaturalized gender and sexuality that can cause Butlerian trouble, ultimately reuniting Alison with her father in the realm of the graphic memoir.3 Fun Home thus contributes to queer life writing by illustrating the potential of comics for mediating positive accounts of queer lives, while also revealing the value of intertextual readings for the identification of such accounts within the field of autographics, as defined by Gillian Whitlock (995). Intertextual references can be identified in the visual and the verbal register, as well as in the space that is created through the interpretive combination of the two. Because of the graphic memoir's explicit references to Proust's life and art, the reader may become inclined to identify further and subtler allusions. Reading Fun Home intertextually, however, reveals how Bechdel turns Bruce's approach to fiction and reality, to literature, and to things and family members into a positive means that enables her autobiographical subject's reclaiming of her father. Bruce's conflation between the real, the fictional, and the artificial is also reflected via his obsession with preserving the anachronistic Gothic Revival style of the house, his imagining of himself as a \"nineteenth-century aristocrat,\" and his seduction of some of his high school students within the domestic domain (60).

Geoffroy of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne by Theodore Evergates traces the remarkable life of Geoffroy of Villehardouin (c. 1148-c. 1217) from his earliest years in Champagne through his last years in Greece after the crusade. The fourth son of a knight, Geoffroy became marshal of Champagne, principal negotiator in organizing the Fourth Crusade, chief of staff of the expedition to and conquest of Constantinople, garrison commander of Constantinople and, in his late fifties, field commander defending the Latin settlement in the Byzantine empire against invading Bulgarian armies and revolting Greek cities. Known for his diplomatic skills and rectitude, he served as the chief military advisor to Count Thibaut III of Champagne and later to Emperor Henry of Constantinople. Geoffroy is remarkable as well for dictating the earliest war memoir in medieval Europe, which is also the earliest prose narrative in Old French. Addressed to a home audience in Champagne, he described what he did, what he saw, and what he heard during his eight years on crusade and especially during the fraught period after the conquest of Constantinople. His memoir, The Book of the Conquest of Constantinople , furnishes a commander's retrospective account of the main events and inner workings of the crusade-the innumerable meetings and speeches, the conduct (not always commendable) of the barons, and the persistent discontent within the army-as well as a celebration of his own deeds as a diplomat and a military commander.

Apresentamos o universo ficcional do amapaense Fernando Canto, como forma de evidenciar e ampliar, em uma perspectiva cruzada (hibrida) concepções políticas entre utopia e distopia. Para isso, em uma concepção histórica, problematizamos no conto O bálsamo (1995) a representação do nativo e do colonizador, nas terras dos homens de um olho só, recepcionada como a floresta amazônica brasileira. Estabelecendo um parâmetro entre sedução, manipulação e resistência, divide-se o artigo em três momentos. No primeiro, pontua-se uma dialética entre pensamento utópico e distópico, para depois situá-lo dentro da ficção narrativa. No segundo, explora-se os elementos poéticos bálsamo e seda - acolhidos como dispositivos de sedução/manipulação, o que abre possibilidade para explorar as categorias poder, opressão e controle. No último momento, aproxima-se a categoria vida nua ao processo de involução dos nativos, e na sequência anuncia-se que, naquelas terras de nativos amazônicos, dizer não fez florescer uma resistência contra narrativa/antidemocrática dos estranhos vestidos de seda. O diálogo teórico se constitui, sobretudo, a partir do pensamento de Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben e Teixeira Coelho.