In Human Journeys and the Quest for Knowledge in African Writing, Adrien Pouille aims to expand the conversation on what human journeys may signify in the African context with several oral and modern narratives. As one of the main informants about African migration, popular journalism has propagated a traumatic and materialistic view of African temporal and spatial movements. Such a reductive conception of the African journeys can also be found on the continent, where leaving home, to the West in particular, may be viewed by many as a quest for nothing more than economic prosperity.

In this visionary book, Michael O’Neill contends that literary fiction may enable individuals to transcend tribe-centered biases by fostering empathetic understanding. Drawing from a wealth of neuroscience research, it investigates how relatable and emotionally resonant characters can encourage readers to identify with others whose lives are markedly different from their own.

The Queen of Kittur by Basavaraj Naikar highlights the themes of honor and glory, patriotism and freedom, betrayal and defeat of the royal family of Kittur as revealed by the life of Rani Chennamma. This novel is a precious jewel in Indian literature.

Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and the Modernist Novel is a study of the novel and consciousness in James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. This volume focuses on novels of the 1920s and engages in a study of Joyce’s epiphany and language play, Yeats’s esoteric philosophy, Lawrence’s vitalism, and Woolf’s stream of consciousness techniques.

A multi-faceted creative personality, Rabindranath Tagore is one of the greatest stalwarts of both English and Bengali literatures. He created a Renaissance in India, where people were awakened by the great corpus of creative work produced during the country’s struggle for independence from the British. Tagore was undoubtedly a champion of this literary protest. He produced masterpieces in Bengali literature and later translated them into English.

Jack Foley has been prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene since the mid-1980s. The Light of Evening traces the arc of his life since his birth in New Jersey in 1940. Foley has spent his life in the pursuit of ways to continue writing poetry in a world in which the status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This candid autobiography offers a portrait of an artist who has continued to produce experimental as well as traditional work and who created theoretical underpinnings for that work.

Paul Brian Heise’s The Wound That Will Never Heal is an original allegorical reading of Richard Wagner’s epic music drama The Ring of the Nibelung. Heise challenges the standard view that Wagner merely dramatizes the conflict between love and power and demonstrates instead that his greatest work is an allegory exploring humanity’s longing for transcendent value and that quest’s paradoxical establishment of a science-based secular society.

Awareness of eco-literature has recalled the central ideology of environmentalism - “to think globally and act locally.” As this volume shows, various tags of contemporary discourse have emerged, including transnational, cosmopolitan, hybridity, diaspora, and generally cultural. These concerns highlight such global environmental problems as biodiversity, climate change, and developing new forms of interconnectedness with local and regional communities. In this context, contemporary discourse becomes of immediate concern in understanding the environmental crisis.

The study of literature and the environment evokes and promotes this highly original eco-critical collection and its contributions to evaluating the preservation of nature and human attachment and to situate it at a local, communitarian, or bio-regional level. Revisiting eco-literature can aid our exploration of numerous global issues and challenges through a literary rendition of the natural world in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Reflecting on different works will prompt the readers to intensify their search for viable and effective choices and healthy alternatives in a confusing world.