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This chapter contains sections titled: Biomythography Myth‐Making: The Brontë Paradigm Variations on the Theme Conclusions

In its early transition to democracy following Franco's death in 1975, Spain rapidly embraced neoliberal practices and policies, some of which directly impacted cultural production. In a few short years, the country commercialized its art and literary markets, investing in \"cultural tourism\" as a tool for economic growth and urban renewal. The artist novel began to proliferate for the first time in a century, but these novels—about artists and art historians—have received little critical attention beyond the descriptive. In Between Market and Myth, Vater studies select authors—Julio Llamazares, Ángeles Caso, Clara Usón, Almudena Grandes, Nieves Herrero, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Lourdes Ortiz, and Enrique Vila-Matas—whose largely realist novels portray a clash between the myth of artistic freedom and artists' willing recruitment or cooptation by market forces or political influence. Today, in an era of rising globalization, the artist novel proves ideal for examining authors' ambivalent notions of creative practice when political patronage and private sector investment complicate belief in artistic autonomy.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Bilingual Legacies examines fatherhood in the work of four canonical Spanish authors born in Barcelona and raised during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Drawing on the autobiographical texts of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Barral, Terenci Moix, and Clara Janes, the book explores how these authors understood gender roles and paternal figures as well as how they positioned themselves in relation to Spanish and Catalan literary traditions.Anna Casas Aguilar contends that through their presentation of father figures, these authors subvert static ideas surrounding fatherhood. She argues that this diversity was crucial in opening the door to revised gender models in Spain during the democratic period. Moving beyond the shadow of the dictator, Casas Aguilar shows how these writers distinguished between the patriarchal \"father of the nation\" and their own paternal figures. In doing so, Bilingual Legacies sheds light on the complexity of Spanish conceptions of gender, language, and family and illustrates how notions of masculinity, authorship, and canon are interrelated.

Other Englands examines the rise of the early English utopia in the context of emergent capitalism. Above all, it asserts that this literary genre was always already an expression of social crisis and economic transition, a context refracted in the origin stories and imagined geographies common to its early modern form. Beginning with the paradigmatic popular utopias of Thomas More and Francis Bacon but attentive to non-canonical examples from the margins of the tradition, the study charts a shifting and, by the time of the English Revolution, self-critical effort to think communities in dynamic socio-spatial forms. Arguing that early utopias have been widely misunderstood and maligned as static, finished polities, Sarah Hogan makes the case that utopian literature offered readers and writers a transformational and transitional social imaginary. She shows how a genre associated with imagining systemic alternatives both contested and contributed to the ideological construction of capitalist imperialism. In the early English utopia, she finds both a precursor to the Enlightenment discourse of political economy and another historical perspective on the beginnings and enduring conflicts of global capital.

While proponents of Chinese IR pursue a national school based on the identification of Chineseness with the Chinese national culture, its critics find a limited value in the ‘Chinese’ school as a mere temporary site for non-Western agencies. In contrast, I argue a distinctive and enduring Chinese IR is possible if it adopts a non-national and non-essentialised transcultural conception of Chineseness. This transcultural Chinese IR is based first on the contested and transcultural conception of Chineseness and second on the ontology of Chineseness as immanent humanity. Chineseness has been a fiction of a privileged descent from antiquity, which various contestants claimed by redefining the meaning of Chineseness. The shi elites, in particular, developed Chineseness as an aspirational ethos that propelled it to transcend its cultural boundary by incorporating foreign influences and thereby rendered Chineseness transcultural. Also, drawing on the ontological turn and Roy Wagner's work in anthropology, I show how Chineseness as immanent humanity transcends the category of culture, transforming the division of innate nature and constructed culture. The transcultural Chinese IR, with its own complexity and universal aspiration, uses its history and ontology to complexify both its tradition internally and other IR traditions externally, promoting the pluralisation of IR.

Fiction depicting the post-communist transition has been little discussed with the focus on the representation of women. At the same time, there is a lack of comparative studies that analyze these fictions produced in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. The article aims to discuss the representation of the transition in the novels of two contemporary female writers from the Republic of Moldova and Poland respectively. Vara în care mama a avut ochii verzi [The Summer When My Mother’s Eyes Were Green] (2017) by Tatiana Țîbuleac and White and Red (2002) by Dorota Masłowska are analyzed from the perspective of World-Literature theory (Warwick Research Collective) to see how the impact of the transition to neoliberalism produces new representations of women in the novel, questioning traditional gender codes. The women as commodities and the women as entrepreneurs, who adapt to the capitalism of the 90s in Eastern Europe are two symptomatic representations in the two novels, which offer, without an explicit feminist stake, a more complex mapping of the post-communist transition.

This study aims to understand how prospective first-generation college students develop their perceptions of college engagement before college attendance through secondary sources. A group of high school students were assigned to read a college-themed mystery novel and rank a series of statements relating to college engagement before and after the activity. Viewpoints of college engagement shifted from a solely academic focus to a more holistic focus after reading the novel. Enjoyment and relatability of the novel were major factors contributing to the shift in viewpoints. Findings suggest that college preparation programs need to expand beyond academics to include social and emotional components through engaging mediums.

Written around 1660, the unique Chinese short story collection Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (Doupeng xianhua), by the author known only as Aina the Layman, uses the seemingly innocuous setting of neighbors swapping yarns on hot summer days under a shady arbor to create a series of stories that embody deep disillusionment with traditional values. The tales, ostensibly told by different narrators, parody heroic legends and explore issues that contributed to the fall of the Ming dynasty a couple of decades before this collection was written, including self-centeredness and social violence. These stories speak to all troubled times, demanding that readers confront the pretense that may lurk behind moralistic stances.Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor presents all twelve stories in English translation along with notes from the original commentator, as well as a helpful introduction and analysis of individual stories.

As coal-mining employment and production levels reach historic low levels in the Appalachian region, institutions and actors articulate divergent discourses of what futures may be possible for the Appalachian region. Using Ada Smith’s (2016) notion of “Appalachian Futurism” as a point of departure (understanding how theorizations of the past structure and limit what is imaginable for the future), I analyze the ways that a federal grants program, the POWER Initiative, frames Appalachia’s economic transition. Through analysis of program documents and investments, I identify how particular discourses of development lead to programmatic foci of interventions around “entrepreneurship” and “workforce development.” I then look at an alternative framing of the discourse of economic transition: one that posits a development agenda focused on improving quality of life for communities, as opposed to job and business creation. Drawing on documents from the Highlander Research and Education Center and on a dozen interviews with economic development practitioners, I detail the ways institutions and actors frame and reframe discourses as part of ideological struggle. In the conclusion, I examine trends for the future development of the region and offer policy suggestions for a more just economic future in the coalfields.

[...]it corresponds to the historical development of calculus as a way to interpret motion as a function of time. [...]we erase the linear time of Vonnegut’s plots by observing networks instead of actions, algebra instead of calculus. The community is not even expected to behave as a social network; the crime-investigation-driven plot of Twin Peaks was expected merely to shine a light on those relationships relevant to the murder of Laura Palmer, hyperfocusing on a network built by the law enforcement officers conducting the investigation. Not only did the network analysis confirm that the community is more than just a set of photos pinned to a plywood board at the Sheriff’s office; we also discovered a new storytelling network phenomenon I have called the Dale Cooper effect, a phase transition in network structure.