Product Description: Studying exile and utopia as correlated cultural phenomena, and offering a wealth of historical examples with emphasis on the modern period, Spariosu argues that modernism itself can be seen as a product of an acute exilic consciousness that often seeks to generate utopian social schemes to compensate for its exacerbated sense of existential loss...read more

Product Description: Increasing concerns about the future of humankind that arise from threats of terrorism, nuclear war, and environmental destruction dramatize the fact that we must begin working collectively to change our ways of interacting with one another and with our habitat...read more

Product Description: Realism has not only shaped important schools and periods in literary history, but has also been a fundamental constant of all literature, its first theoretical formulation being the principle of mimesis in Aristotle's Poetics. Realism can be considered by extension one of the main aspects of literary theory, the aims of which must be to define its concepts clearly and to neutralize the imprecision, polysemy, and ambiguity that often characterized the application of realism...read more

Mihai Spariosu's book strikingly intervenes in the debate raging among the various oppositional and hegemonic discourses by advancing a new philosophy that transcends the currently prevailing agonistic mentality. He develops a ludic-irenic view intended to exceed both a voluntaristic and rationalist mode of thought, thereby convincingly opposing the all-pervading mentality of power in a world marked by difference, scapegoating, and strife between various social, ethnic, racial, and sexual factions. The ludic-irenic stance, basically derived from the playfulness of literature, produces alternative mentalities and alternative worlds which promote a responsive understanding of what there is, thus bringing to bear a healing influence within the human community, in which power and difference will cease to be ultimates. What Spariosu puts forward and demonstrates by means of a stupendous erudition is no less than a total reorientation of cultural criticism that is bound to have its impact on the course cultural studies will take. (view table of contents)

Sixteen Transylvanian tales deal with ghosts, vampires, werewolves, haunted treasures, and magical spirits

Product Description: A collection of academic essays on the nature of play. Includes essays such as "Foucault, Deleuze, and the Playful Fold of the Self" by Ronald Bogue and "Redefining the Ludic: Mimesis, Expression, and the Festival Mode" by Michael J. C. Echeruo.