In the 1930s, the exciting urban environment of Montreal provided the perfect venue for a varied group of people who came together to form a kind of “salon” in the turmoil of the Great Depression. For ten years, these friends and acquaintances met each week at the home of the artist John Lyman. They saw themselves as “modern,” a part of the avant-garde that was then busily changing the world.

Edited by rising Tunisian literary scholar Hassen Zriba, Postmodernism and Narratives of Erasure in Culture, Literature, and Language is a collection of interdisciplinary essays arguing that the concept of “erasure” is an essential analytical tool/mode of thought in shaping conceptualizations of change and continuity in subjects of human knowledge.

In Alistair MacLeod: A Literary Companion, Canadian literary scholar Corey Evan Thompson seeks to offer general readers and advanced students of Canadian literature an introductory overview of the life and writings of the Canadian novelist and short story author Alistair MacLeod. While MacLeod’s profile was not as prolific as other Canadian authors, such as Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro, his writings have left an indelible impression on readers and critics alike.

We live in a time when disinformation is rampant across all media outlets, especially the new format of social media. This cynicism pervades advertising and marketing, government and politics, medicine and public health, as well as print, television, and radio journalism. Deliberate lies and expedient distortions, ad hominem attacks, and smearing implications prevail alongside honest news and accurate information.

This critical volume of essays explores how texts and literary theories interrelate and interconnect different principles of critical evaluation. Reading for pleasure is different from reading for aesthetic sensibility. To read literature is to seek experience but interpreting the text is to add perspective. A skilled reader will apply multiple lenses to the same text to explore how different texts and theories interact with each other. The Mirror and the Reflections collects various approaches to literary theory from a postcolonial perspective.

The death of Spain’s Don Carlos, Prince of Asturias, on July 24, 1568, remains an enigma. Several accounts insinuated that the Spanish Crown Prince was murdered while incarcerated by order of his father, King Philip II. The mystery of Don Carlos’s death, supported by ambassadorial accounts that implied foul play, became a fertile subject for defamation campaigns against Philip, fostering an extraordinary fluidity between history and fiction.

In Tradition and Emancipation, Japanese scholar Megumi Ohsumi explores the mimetic encounters of classical material across Alexander Pope’s poetry. Focusing particularly on Pope’s Horatian Imitations, Ohsumi attempts to identify the extent to which mimesis plays a role in Pope’s oeuvre. Horace has remained one of the central Roman figures in classical tradition, and Renaissance humanism propelled Western European writers to explore his life and career and weave them into their own creative accounts.

Football as Literature adopts semiotics as a framework to compare football (soccer) to literature. The football field is akin to the plot or stage in narrative or dramatic modes, respectively, and the players are viewed as characters whose metamorphoses, in the text of football, are occasioned from the label of their positions to the completeness of the plot by the kinetic power of the ball. In employing this commentary, a standard football match is seen as a representation of the active text. Particularly, without commentary football unfolds as an unspoken semiotic narrative.

No dramatist has treated identity in as many ways and in such depth as William Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s Identities, James P. Driscoll shows how the Bard used history, comedy, tragedy, and romance to develop comprehensive treatments of personal identity.

Literary critics have aptly noted that death is arguably the most frequent topic, theme, or occurrence in all of American literature. Naturally, the works of such authors as Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Kate Chopin, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King, among countless others, go to great lengths to support this observation; however, the renowned nineteenth-century American literary giant Herman Melville, most famous as the author of Moby Dick, has been frequently overlooked.