National Network for Equitable Library Service

Anton Chekhov's representations of children have generally remained on the periphery of scholarly attention. Yet his stories about children, which focus on communication and the emergence of personhood, also illuminate the process by which the author forged his own language of expression and occupy a uniquely important place within his work. Chekhov's Children explores these stories - dating from Chekhov's early writings in the 1880s - as a distinct body of work unified by the theme of maturation and by the creation of a literary model of childhood.

In the making of the modern Nordic states in the first half of the twentieth century, elementary education was paramount in creating a notion of citizenship that was universal and equal for all citizens. Yet these elementary education policies ignored, in most cases, the language, culture, wishes, and needs of minorities such as the indigenous Sámi.Presenting the Sámi as an active, transnational population in early twentieth-century northern Europe, Otso Kortekangas examines how educational policies affected the Sámi people residing in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

In the decade before and after independence, Nigerians not only adopted the novel but reinvented the genre. Nigerian novels imagined the new state, with its ideals of the rule of law, state sovereignty, and a centralized administration. Debt, Law, Realism argues that Nigerian novels were not written for a Western audience, as often stated, but to teach fellow citizens how to envision the state. The first Nigerian novels were overwhelmingly realist because realism was a way to convey the understanding shared by all subject to the rule of law.

At war for sixty years, eighteenth-century Britain and France experienced demographic, social, and economic exchanges despite their imperial rivalry. Paradoxically, this rivalry spurred their participation in scientific and industrial developments. Their shared interest in standards of living and cultural practices was fuelled by migration and philosophical exchanges that reciprocally transmitted the values of urban geography, medicine, teaching, and the industrial and fine arts. In Imperial Paradoxes Robert Merrett compares British and French literature on those topics.

The 1970s in Britain saw a series of industrial disputes, a referendum on membership in the European Economic Community, conflict about issues of immigration and citizenship, and emergent environmental and feminist movements. It was also a decade of innovation in the novel, and novelists often addressed the state of the nation directly in their works.

The race to climb Everest catapulted mountain climbing, with its accompanying images of conquest and sport, into the public sphere on a global scale. But as a metaphor for the pinnacle of human achievement, mountaineering remains the preserve of traditional white male heroism. False Summit unpacks gender politics in the expedition narratives and memoirs of mountaineers in the Himalayas and the Karakoram. Why are women still a minority in the world's highest places?

This Strange Lonelinessis the first comprehensive account of the poetic relationship between Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth.

The bestselling biography of renowned Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables available in English for the first time The name Hanako Muraoka is revered in Japan. Her Japanese translation of L. M. Montgomery's beloved children's classic Anne of Green Gables, Akage no An (Red-haired Anne), was the catalyst for the book's massive and enduring popularity in Japan. A book that has since spawned countless interpretations, from manga to a long-running television series, and has remained on Japanese curriculum for half a century.

Vivid stories from a Canadian literary icon, who shares a life spread across continents and immersed in books. It’s the life that many dream of: education in some of Europe’s most beautiful cities before becoming a novelist, essayist, translator and literary curator. But the start of Linda Leith’s journey is anything but idyllic.

In 1971, Harry Bruce, recognized as one of Canada's top non-fiction writers, lost his mind-according to his peers-when he left bustling, lucrative Toronto and moved his family to the tough little seaport of Halifax. Harry was already acquainted with Halifax; at eighteen, he lived at HMCS Stadacona as an officer-cadet in the Royal Canadian Navy. He joined the navy chiefly to lose his virginity.