Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s last play, an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru first performed in 1799, was one of the most popular of the entire century. Set during the Spanish Conquest of Peru, Pizarro dramatizes English fears of invasion by Revolutionary France, but it is also surprisingly and critically engaged with Britain’s colonial exploits abroad. Pizarro is a play of firsts: the first use of music alongside action, the first collapsing set, the first production to inspire such celebratory ephemera as cartoons, portraits, postcards, even porcelain collector plates. Pizarro marks the end of eighteenth-century drama and the birth of a new theatrical culture.
This edition features a comprehensive introduction and extensive appendices documenting the play’s first successful performances and global influence. It will appeal to students and scholars of Romantic literature, theatre history, post-colonialism, and Indigenous studies.
Selena Couture is Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Alberta.
Alexander Dick works and teaches in the fields of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic British Literatures, Critical Theory and Practice, especially post-humanism and speculative realism, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of more than twenty articles and chapters and Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790-1830 (Palgrave 2013). He is also the co-editor of two collections of essays, Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing Between Philosophy and Literature (with Christina Lupton, Pickering, 2008) and Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (with Angela Esterhammer, Toronto, 2009).
Written by an international team of leading scholars, this engaging textbook on the study of English historical linguistics is uniquely organized in terms of theoretical approaches and perspectives. Each chapter features textboxes, case studies, suggestions for further reading and exercises, enabling students to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and guiding them on undertaking further research. The case studies and exercises guide students in approaching and manipulating empirical data, providing them with hands-on experience of conducting linguistic research. An extensive variety of approaches, from traditional to contemporary, is treated, including generative approaches, historical sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches, psycholinguistic perspectives, grammaticalization theory, and discourse-based approaches, as well as perspectives on standardization and language variation. Each chapter applies the concepts discussed to data from the history of English, and a glossary of key terms enables easy navigation and quick cross-referencing. An essential resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of the history of English linguistics.
Laurel Brinton is a specialist in the English Language, with a focus on the history of English. Her particular areas of interest include English historical linguistics, historical pragmatics (discourse markers), grammaticalization and lexicalization, phrasal verbs and composite predicates, corpus linguistics, and aspectual studies. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in English with a Linguistics Emphasis in 1981, and she has been working at UBC ever since.
The Friedman House is a modernist icon, designed by Frederic Lasserre, founder of the UBC School of Architecture, and
landscaped by Cornelia Oberlander. Faced with demolition, it was saved by purchasers who understood its architectural value
and historical significance. This book reflects on the possibility of its destruction, remarking on what has been salvaged by its
continued existence, and what could have potentially been lost.
Professor of English and co-founder of the Bachelor of Media Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. He is the author or editor of six books and more than 80 articles and reviews.
Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators argues the need to move beyond the monolingual paradigm within Anglophone literary studies. Using Lyotard’s concept of post as the future anterior (back to the future), this book sets up a concept of post-multiculturalism salvaging the elements within multiculturalism that have been forgotten in its contemporary denigration. Gunew attaches this discussion to debates in neo-cosmopolitanism over the last decade, creating a framework for re-evaluating post-multicultural and Indigenous writers in settler colonies such as Canada and Australia. She links these writers with transnational writers across diasporas from Eastern Europe, South-East Asia, China and India to construct a new framework for literary and cultural studies.
In Posthumanism, Peter Mahon provides an overview of posthumanism, exploring not only the key scientific advances in information technology and genetics that have made us and society posthuman, but also how certain strands in art (such as science fiction and video games) and philosophy (for example, in the work of Andy Clarke and Jacques Derrida) have played—and continue to play—a crucial role in shaping how we understand those advances. Mahon’s analysis draws on an understanding of technology as a pharmakon—an ancient Greek word for a substance that is both a poison and a cure—as he considers our posthuman future, as envisioned by a range of futurists, from Ray Kurzweil to those at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. What seems clear is that this future will require massive shifts in how we think about ourselves as techno-biological entities, about the benefits and threats of intelligent technologies and about the roles consumerism and universal basic income will play in societies. Posthumanism is our present, our future and a challenge to which we must rise.
Reviews and Endorsements:
“Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed is a wide-ranging, informative and engagingly written book on the emergent field of posthuman studies, which challenges traditional humanities scholarship by addressing the processes of digitalization, medicalization, and globalization, as well as contemporary environmental and political challenges like climate change, migration, biopolitics and terrorism. Mahon’s book presents and explains difficult philosophical, scientific and technical questions relevant to the current discussion about posthumanism in an accessible manner. It is particularly strong and innovative in its presentation of the scientific and technical discussions about enhancement, information theory, artificial intelligence and biotechnology and how these translate into different philosophical positions on the post- and transhuman.” – Stefan Herbrechter, Research Fellow, Coventry University, UK
Peter Mahon is the author of Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and Glas (U of Toronto, 2007),Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury Academic, 2009) and Violence, Politics and Textual Interventions in Northern Ireland (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). He has published essays in a number of journals such as ELH,James Joyce Quarterly,Irish University Review and Partial Answers.
This fully revised second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature offers a comprehensive introduction to major writers, genres and topics. For this edition several chapters have been completely re-written to reflect major developments in Canadian literature since 2004. Surveys of fiction, drama, and poetry are complemented by chapters on Aboriginal writing, autobiography, literary criticism, writing by women, and the emergence of urban writing. Areas of research that have expanded since the first edition include environmental concerns and questions of sexuality which are freshly explored across several different chapters. A substantial chapter on francophone writing is included. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, noted for her experiments in multiple literary genres, are given full consideration, as is the work of authors who have achieved major recognition, such as Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.
Eva-Marie Kröller (FRSC) specializes in literary history, travel writing, life-writing, and cultural semiotics. Work in progress includes a study of imperial life-writing, using the papers of the McIlwraith family, and a biography of Thomas B. Costain. She has been visiting professor at U of Bonn and Free U of Berlin and held an Alexander-von Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Bonn. Honours and fellowships include a Killam Research Prize, a Killam Teaching Prize, a Killam Faculty Research Fellowship, and election to the Royal Society of Canada
What do we value? Why do we value it? And in a neoliberal age, can morality ever displace money as the primary means of defining value? These are the questions that drove David Foster Wallace, a writer widely credited with changing the face of contemporary fiction and moving it beyond an emotionless postmodern irony. Jeffrey Severs argues in David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books that Wallace was also deeply engaged with the social, political, and economic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A rebellious economic thinker, Wallace satirized the deforming effects of money, questioned the logic of the monetary system, and saw the world through the lens of value’s many hidden and untapped meanings. In original readings of all of Wallace’s fiction, from The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest to his story collections and The Pale King, Severs reveals Wallace to be a thoroughly political writer whose works provide an often surreal history of financial crises and economic policies.
I study postmodern and contemporary U.S. fiction, with a special interest in Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and John Edgar Wideman. I co-edited (with Christopher Leise) Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (U of Delaware P, 2011), and my book, David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value, will be published by Columbia University Press in 2016. My articles, on subjects ranging from Barack Obama and Philip Roth to Breaking Bad, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Jonathan Lethem, have been published or are forthcoming in Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, MELUS, Studies in American Fiction, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and several edited collections.
Laurel J. Brinton, Patrick Honeybone (U of Edinburgh), Bernd Kortmann (U of Freiburg), editors
Cambridge University Press
2016
English Language and Linguistics, published three times a year, is an international journal which focuses on the description of the English language within the framework of contemporary linguistics. The journal is concerned equally with the synchronic and the diachronic aspects of English language studies and publishes articles of the highest quality which make a substantial contribution to our understanding of the structure and development of the English language and which are informed by a knowledge and appreciation of linguistic theory. English Language and Linguistics carries articles and short discussion papers or squibs on all core aspects of English, from its beginnings to the present day, including syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics and lexis. There is also a major review section including, from time to time, articles that give an overview of current research in particular specialist areas. Occasional issues are devoted to a special topic, when a guest editor is invited to commission articles from leading specialists in the field.
Laurel Brinton is a specialist in the English Language, with a focus on the history of English. Her particular areas of interest include English historical linguistics, historical pragmatics (discourse markers), grammaticalization and lexicalization, phrasal verbs and composite predicates, corpus linguistics, and aspectual studies. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in English with a Linguistics Emphasis in 1981, and she has been working at UBC ever since.
When her 1912 story collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, was rescued from obscurity in the 1990s, scholars were quick to celebrate Sui Sin Far as a pioneering chronicler of Asian American Chinatowns. Newly discovered works, however, reveal that Edith Eaton (1865-1914) published on a wide variety of subjects – and under numerous pseudonyms – in Canada and Jamaica for a decade before she began writing Chinatown fiction signed “Sui Sin Far” for US magazines. Born in England to a Chinese mother and a British father, and raised in Montreal, Edith Eaton is a complex transnational writer whose expanded oeuvre demands reconsideration. Becoming Sui Sin Far collects and contextualizes seventy of Eaton’s early works, most of which have not been republished since they first appeared in turn-of-the-century periodicals. These works of fiction and journalism, in diverse styles and from a variety of perspectives, document Eaton’s early career as a short story writer, “stunt-girl” journalist, ethnographer, political commentator, and travel writer. Showcasing her playful humour, savage wit, and deep sympathy, the texts included in this volume assert a significant place for Eaton in North American literary history. Mary Chapman’s introduction provides an insightful and readable overview of Eaton’s transnational career. The volume also includes an expanded bibliography that lists over two hundred and sixty works attributed to Eaton, a detailed biographical timeline, and a newly discovered interview with Eaton from the year in which she first adopted the orientalist pseudonym for which she is best known. Becoming Sui Sin Far significantly expands our understanding of the themes and topics that defined Eaton’s oeuvre and will interest scholars and students of Canadian, American, Asian North American, and ethnic literatures and history.
Mary Chapman (B.A. Queen’s, M.A. Queen’s, Ph.D. Cornell) is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. She specializes in American literature and transnational American Studies; in particular, she works on intersections between cultural forms (i.e. suffrage activism, print culture, parlor theatricals, parades), literary production, and politics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.
While current scholarly interest has assured Marshall McLuhan’s (1911-80) foundational status as a media theorist, much room still exists for further exploration of his writings, which have taken on additional layers of significance in our contemporary digital moment. Holding that media were extensions of the human, McLuhan also posited that the human was a product of technology. Ranging across fields as diverse as art history, biotechnology, and beyond, this collection of essays considers McLuhan’s ground-breaking approach within a number of new contexts and explores the distinguishing features of his media theory.
My research focus on media theory and Canadian Studies finds common ground in my publications on foundational media theorist Marshall McLuhan. I am the author of McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (U Toronto P, 2002) and of Remediating McLuhan (Amsterdam UP, 2016), the editor of On the Nature of Media: Essays by Marshall McLuhan(Gingko, 2016), and the curator of spectresofmcluhan.arts.ubc.ca. I have also written the critical performance piece, Marinetti Dines with the High Command (Guernica, 2014), and the architectural study Friedman House (ORO, 2017)
Professor of English and co-founder of the Bachelor of Media Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. He is the author or editor of six books and more than 80 articles and reviews.
Sneja Gunew is the author of 
