Spring/Summer 2009 - University of Toronto Press Publishing

l i t e r a r y s t u d i e s
Translating Pain
Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture
Madelaine Hron
Stones of Law,
Bricks of Shame
Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age
Edited by Jan Alber and Frank Lauterbach
In the post-Cold War,
post-9/11 era, the immigrant
experience has
changed dramatically.
Despite the recent successes
of immigrant and
world literatures, there
has been little scholarship
on how the hardships
of immigration are
conveyed in immigrant
narratives. Translating
Pain fills this gap by examining literature from
Muslim North Africa, the Caribbean, and Eastern
Europe to reveal the representation of immigrant
suffering in fiction.
Applying immigrant psychology to literary analysis,
Madelaine Hron examines the ways in which
different forms of physical and psychological pain
are expressed in a wide variety of texts. She juxtaposes
post-colonial and post-communist concerns
about immigration, and contrasts Muslim
world views with those of Caribbean creolité and
post-Cold War ethics. Demonstrating how pain
is translated into literature, she explores the ways
in which it also shapes narrative, culture, history,
and politics. A compelling and accessible study,
Translating Pain is a groundbreaking work of literary
and postcolonial studies.
Madelaine Hron is an assistant professor in the
Department of English and Film at Wilfrid Laurier
University.
The prison system was
one of the primary social
issues of the Victorian
era and a regular focus of
debate among the period’s
reformers, novelists,
and poets. Stones of Law,
Bricks of Shame brings
together essays from a
broad range of scholars,
who examine writings
on the Victorian prison
system that were authored not by inmates, but by
thinkers from the respectable middle class.
Studying the ways in which writings on prisons
were woven into the fabric of the period, the contributors
consider the ways in which these works affected
inmates, the prison system, and the Victorian public.
Contesting and extending Michel Foucault’s ideas
on power and surveillance in the Victorian prison
system, Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame covers texts
from Charles Dickens to Henry James. This essential
volume will refocus future scholarship on prison
writing and the Victorian era.
Jan Alber is an assistant professor in the Department
of English at the University of Freiburg.
Frank Lauterbach is a lecturer in english and cultural
studies at the University of Göttingen.
Approx. 304 pp / 6 x 9 / March 2009
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8020-9919-8 £40.00 $60.00 E
Approx. 336 pp / 6 x 9 / April 2009
3 photos
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8020-9897-9 £42.00 $65.00 E
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